Albert J. Nock Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“The State always moves slowly and grudgingly towards any purpose that accrues to society's advantage, but moves rapidly and with alacrity towards one that accrues to its own advantage; nor does it ever move towards social purposes on its own initiative, but only under heavy pressure, while its motion towards anti-social purposes is self-sprung.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“Considering mankind's indifference to freedom, their easy gullibility and their facile response to conditioning, one might very plausibly argue that collectivism is the political mode best suited to their disposition and their capacities. Under its regime, the citizen, like the soldier, is relieved of the burden of initiative and is divested of all responsibility, save for doing as he is told.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“The question of who is right and who is wrong has seemed to me always too small to be worth a moment's thought, while the question of what is right and what is wrong has seemed all-important.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, the state's first instinct is that of self-preservati on. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“In proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“As a general principle, I should put it that a man's country is where the things he loves are most respected. Circumstances may have prevented his ever setting foot there, but it remains his country.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. Â One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. Â The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“Another strange notion pervading whole peoples is that the State has money of its own; and nowhere is this absurdity more firmly fixed than in America. The State has no money. It produces nothing. It existence is purely parasitic, maintained by taxation; that is to say, by forced levies on the production of others. 'Government money,' of which one hears so much nowadays, does not exist; there is no such thing.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“The State, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“The competition of social power with State power is always disadvantaged, since the State can arrange the terms of competition to suit itself, even to the point of outlawing any exercise of social power whatever in the premises; in other words, giving itself a monopoly.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern of journalists and publicists; the serious student sees in them only one root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“The only thing that the psychically-human being can do to improve society is to present society with one improved unit.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“The civilization of a country consists in the quality of life that is lived there, and this quality shows plainest in the things that people choose to talk about when they talk together, and in the way they choose to talk about them.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another, there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“The mentality of an army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence; it remains persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“The primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“It is interesting to observe that in the year 1935 the average individual's incurious attitude towards the phenomenon of the State is precisely what his attitude was toward the phenomenon of the Church in the year, say, 1500. It does not appear to have occurred to the Church-citizen of that day, any more than it occurs to the State-citizen of the present, to ask what sort of institution it was that claimed his allegiance.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it, and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalized privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it cannot even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation-th at is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning and exploiting class and a property-less dependent class - that is, for a criminal purpose.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“As might be supposed, my parents were quite poor, but we somehow never seemed to lack anything we needed, and I never saw a trace of discontent or a failure in cheerfulness over their lot in life, as indeed over anything.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“There's only one way to improve society. Present it with a single improved unit: yourself.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“When a beggar asks us for a quarter, our instinct is to say that the State has already confiscated our quarter for his benefit, and he should go to the State about it.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“Assuming that man has a distinct spiritual nature, a soul, why should it be thought unnatural that under appropriate conditions of maladjustment, his soul might die before his body does; or that his soul might die without his knowing it?”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“For the majority of people liberty means only the system and the administrators they are used to.”
-- Albert J. Nock -
“The State did not originate in any form of social agreement, or with any disinterested view of promoting order and justice. Far otherwise. The State originated in conquest and confiscation, as a device for maintaining the stratification of society permanently into two classes-an owning and exploiting class, relatively small, and a propertyless dependent class. . . . No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose than to enable the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another.”
-- Albert J. Nock
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