a penetrating statement

"Don’t use anarchism to become an anarchist. Use anarchism to become better in your life at whatever it is you are doing already."

Dustin R. Snyder (via disobey)

"Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number —
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you —
Ye are many — they are few."

Percy Bysshe Shelley (via thefreelioness)

"

Christian Anarchism is based upon the answer of Jesus to the Pharisees when Jesus said that he without sin should be the first to cast the stone, and upon the Sermon on the Mount which advises the return of good for evil and the turning of the other cheek. Therefore, when we take any part in government by voting for legislative, judicial, and executive officials, we make these men our arm by which we cast a stone and deny the Sermon on the Mount.

The dictionary definition of a Christian is one who follows Christ; kind, kindly, Christ-like. Anarchism is voluntary cooperation for good, with the right of secession. A Christian anarchist is therefore one who turns the other cheek, overturns the tables of the moneychangers, and does not need a cop to tell him how to behave. A Christian anarchist does not depend upon bullets or ballots to achieve his ideal; he achieves that ideal daily by the One-Man Revolution with which he faces a decadent, confused, and dying world.

"

Ammon Hennacy (via disobey)

"Literally, “anarchy” means “without an archon.” Archons were leaders of ancient Greek city-states. But being without a leader — without an archon — is not necessarily to be without law. The vast bulk of law emerges not from the commands of sovereign rulers but, rather, from the everyday interactions of countless ordinary people as they exchange, intermingle, cooperate, and come into conflict with each other. Only the most naïve social creationist equates the dictates of strongmen (or of groups of strongmen, such as assemble in legislatures) with “law."

Don Boudreaux (via anarchei)

(Source: cafehayek.com, via anarchei)

"I’ve told the kids in the ghettos that violence won’t solve their problems, but then they ask me, and rightly so; “Why does the government use massive doses of violence to bring about the change it wants in the world?” After this I knew that I could no longer speak against the violence in the ghettos without also speaking against the violence of my government"

Martin Luther King Jr. (via loveinfamine)

(via thecheekylibertarian)

"Experience shows that if something is going to go really wrong, predictably waste your time, annoy you and attack your dignity, and finally just prove to be totally ineffective at accomplishing the task, there’s a good chance that it involves the government."

Jeffrey Tucker (via anarchei)

(Source: lfb.org, via anarchei)

"

There’s this weird thing where people say — “well you know, a ‘free society’ is only going to work if everybody is perfect, if everybody is really good.” And they think that we’re going to be like these dreamy-eyed, dewy-eyed, rainbow-afro’d lambs — baying around, chewing on the cuds of liberty .p . . but the moment a wolf comes in, AHHHH, it’s all over! The moment some bad guy comes along he’s just going to take over all of society, and we’re all just gonna go “baa-aa-aa-aa” and walk right back into the slaughterhouse.

And nothing, really, could be further from the truth. The idea of a voluntary society, or a stateless society, or an anarchic society, is not idealistic. What is idealistic is a statist society — that is naive, and dangerous . . . because a statist society carries with it the assumption that you’re going to create this incredible hierarchy, this blood-soaked pyramid — institutionalised hierarchical power — with the power to print money whenever it wants, the power to start wars, to incarcerate at-will, to create laws at-will, to bribe their friends and punish their enemies . . . and not ONE SINGLE evil guy is ever going to be interested in running that system. Never! You’re only going to get really great guys at the top, and all the evil guys are going to be criminals in alleys, they’re never going to be congressmen or presidents or prime ministers, or anything like that!

It is the statist who is naive about human nature and the potential for evil. The anarchist, the voluntaryist, recognises that human nature is corrupted by power — and to create a monolithic thing called “the state,” with all of the powers that it has, is only gonna draw — like flies to shit, the most evil people to the top of that pyramid structure. And so, we cannot have a state because human nature is prone to wanting something for nothing, you know, ‘the desire for the unearned is the root of all evil.’ And so we recognise that you can’t create this monster machine called “the state,” and not end up with bad people driving it. The possibility of human evil is exactly why we can’t have a state.

"

(via disobey)

(Source: facebook.com, via shecallsmeartemis-deactivated20)

"Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a Great Leap Forward that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous."

Robert Higgs (via disobey)

(via antigovernmentextremist)

"This country was built on gangs. This country is still running on gangs. Republicans, democrats, the police department, the FBI, the CIA. Those are gangs."

Tupac Shakur (via haereticum)

"I would like to see every single soldier on every single side, just take off your helmet, unbuckle your kit, lay down your rifle, and set down at the side of some shady lane, and say, nope, I ain’t a gonna kill nobody. Plenty of rich folks wants to fight. Give them the guns."

Woodie Guthrie (via haereticum)