Coercion Quotes

True unalienable rights do not require one to trample other unalienable rights.

The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe!

G.K. Chesterton

There is no need for us all to be alike and think the same way, neither do we need a common enemy to force us to come together and reach out to each other. If we allow ourselves and everyone else the freedom to fully individuate as spiritual beings in human form, there will be no need for us to be forced by worldly circumstances to take hands and stand together. Our souls will automatically want to flock together, like moths to the flame of our shared Divinity, yet each with wings covered in the glimmering colors and unique patterns of our individual human expression.

Anthon St. Maarten

A vast amount of psychiatric effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to legal and quasi-legal activities. In my opinion, the only certain result has been the aggrandizement of psychiatry. The value to the legal profession and to society as a whole of psychiatric help in administering the criminal law, is, to say the least, uncertain. Perhaps society has been injured, rather than helped, by the furor psychodiagnosticus and psychotherapeuticus in criminology which it invited, fostered, and tolerated.

Thomas Szasz

The fatal weakness of most psychiatric historiographies lies in the historians' failure to give sufficient weight to the role of coercion in psychiatry and to acknowledge that mad-doctoring had nothing to do with healing.

Thomas Szasz

For every dollar that is spent on the (boondoggle) bridge a dollar will be taken away from taxpayers. If the bridge costs $1,000,000 the taxpayers will lose $1,000, 000. They will have that much taken away from them which they would otherwise have spent on the things they needed most.

Henry Hazlitt

One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.

Albert Einstein

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

Pat Conroy

Many professionals have to sign gagging clauses or face the sack if they speak out. The social worker and therapist was familiar with the scare that revelation brings to the survivor. […]We are in this story. It isn't ours, but we are in it nonetheless, not least because of the viscous campaign which has followed us over the last ten years. Any organisation with which we work may receive correspondence from the accused adults’ and ‘false memory’ movements. Some of these propagandists are confidentially dominating the professional and political arguments using new information technology to spread what we consider to be smears, innuendo and misinformation. P8(refers to authors Beatrix Campbell & Judith Jones – a journalist and a social worker/therapist)

Beatrix Campbell

The discovery that detonated Cleveland is one of Britain’s great contributions to awareness of child abuse. In 1986 and 1987 the Leeds paediatricians Dr Jane Wynne and Dr Christopher Hobbs reported in the Lancet that they were seeing more children who were being buggered than battered. About 300 cases were corroborated. The children were young – two-thirds were pre-school children – and anal abuse was more common than vaginal penetration. They also noted that ‘boys and girls seem to be at similar risk’. Almost half of the children who suffered anal abuse also showed a sign written up in the forensic textbooks as ‘anal dilation’, an anus opening when it was supposed to stay shut; opening and expecting entry. What the paediatricians were observing was not an acute sign, the effect of a single intrusion – a spasm or seizure – but a sign that was telling a story about everyday life; the anatomy of adaption. Anal dilation seemed to describe the architecture of abuse: it allowed the body to receive an incoming object, regularly.

Beatrix Campbell

Young girls frequently report that their early sexual experiences were coerced. In a study in South Africa, 30 percent of girls report that their first sexual intercourse was forced. In rural Malawi, 55 percent of adolescent girls surveyed report that they were often forced to have sex.

Njovana Watts

A government is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction) and, implied in this, a compulsory territorial monopolist of taxation. That is, a government is the ultimate arbiter, for the inhabitants of a given territory, regarding what is just and what is not, and it can determine unilaterally, i.e., without requiring the consent of those seeking justice or arbitration, the price that justice-seekers must pay to the government for providing this service.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Those who claim to be hurt by words must be led to expect nothing as compensation. Otherwise, once they learn they can get something by claiming to be hurt, they will go into the business of being offended.

Jonathan Rauch

Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.

Friedrich A. Hayek

Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.

Ludwig von Mises

In spite of its alluring name, the welfare state stands or falls by compulsion. It is compulsion imposed upon us with the state’s power to punish noncompliance. Once this is clear, it is equally clear that the welfare state is an evil the same as every restriction of freedom.

Wilhelm Röpke

Liberty should be understood as freedom from the government, specifically, freedom from the initiation of physical force by the government.

George Reisman

Government is a gang, but not merely as meritorious as a private gang because it claims legal legitimacy. It pillages and uses violence but under the cover of law, and seeks legitimacy not through competition but through the myth of the social contract.

Jeffrey Tucker

The medical profession's classic prescription for coping with such predicaments, Primum non nocere (First, do no harm), sounds better than it is. In fact, it fails to tell us precisely what we need to know: What is harm and what is help? However, two things about the challenge of helping the helpless are clear. One is that, like beauty and ugliness, help and harm often lie in the eyes of the beholder--in our case, in the often divergently directed eyes of the benefactor and his beneficiary. The other is that harming people in the name of helping them is one of mankind's favorite pastimes.

Thomas Szasz

The ethics of psychiatric therapy is the very negation of the ethics of political liberty. The former embraces absolute power, provided it is used to protect and promote the patient's mental health. The latter rejects absolute power, regardless of its aim or use.

Thomas Szasz

The government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged 'services' and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket.

Robert Higgs

Honoring the value of competence and steadfastness requires a generosity of spirit and a curbing of the passion for envy, traits that few people value and fewer still cultivate and acquire. Not until there is more of Smith and less of Hobbes in the human heart, will the majority of people prefer peaceful and boring market relations to the violent and exciting relations between coercer and coerced, predator and victim

Thomas Szasz

If the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang.

Murray N. Rothbard

Money is not an invention of the state. It is not the product of a legislative act. Even the sanction of political authority is not necessary for its existence. Certain commodities came to be money quite naturally, as the result of economic relationships that were independent of the power of the state.

Carl Menger

Nowadays the job of the judge is not to do justice. The judge is more of a functionary . He's like a civil servant whose job is to interpret words written down by another branch of the government, whether those words are just or not.

Stephan Kinsella

It is mainly by resisting authority that the individual defines himself. This is why authorities--whether parental, priestly, political, or psychiatric--must be careful how and where they assert themselves; for while it is true that the more they assert themselves the more they govern, it is also true that the more they assert themselves the more opportunities they offer for being successfully denied.

Thomas Szasz

It is only you, treading in the blessed path of peace and freedom, who can bring about the true regeneration of society, and with it the true happiness of your own lives.

Auberon Herbert

Government programs didn’t arise because the people demanded them or because the free market was unable to provide needed services. They arose because the politicians found them to be a convenient way to buy votes with other people’s money, a convenient way to enlarge their own power, a convenient way to reward their political cronies, and a convenient way to keep people dependent on government.

Harry Browne

When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.

Ron Paul

The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.

Harry Browne

People who can't imagine order without imposition always end up favoring power over liberty.

Jeffrey Tucker

The root of liberalism, in a word, is hatred of compulsion, for liberalism has the respect for the individual and his conscience and reason which the employment of coercion necessarily destroys. The liberal has faith in the individual – faith that he can be persuaded by rational means to beliefs compatible with social good.

Harold Edmund Stearns

Before you take that first curious, coerced, spiteful, or vengeful step forward, remember this: it’s a thousand times easier to slip into a muddy pit than it is to climb out of one.

Richelle E. Goodrich

It is impossible for us to make any real advance until we take to heart this great truth, that without freedom of choice, without freedom of action, there are not such things as true moral qualities; there can only be submissive wearing of the cords that others have tied round our hands.

Auberon Herbert

No one can take away your Natural Rights, but they can do great damage making you think they can.

J.S.B. Morse

If you require force to promote your ideal, there is something wrong with your ideal.

J.S.B. Morse

It's illegal to forcefully take money from people unless you're the government. It's illegal to take someone's liberty, unless you're the government. It's illegal to kill someone, unless you're the government. Private organizations can do everything that government can do except for legally break the law.

J.S.B. Morse

Whenever the government is involved, there is an element of coercion.

Dinesh D'Souza

Historical definition of a country's borders... "...here's where my murder geography ends and your murder geography begins, at least until I get more murderers to expand my murder-fest.

Stefan Molyneux

Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness. Society promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, government negatively by restraining our vices. Society encourages intercourse. Government creates distinctions.

Thomas Paine

In monarchies, each man's desire to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by beer, or force, by patronage, or by honor, and by professional standing armies. By contrast, republics had to hold themselves together from the bottom up, ultimately.

Gordon S. Wood

History is the same story with different costumes.

Stefan Molyneux

No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.

Ludwig von Mises

The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this--that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.

Lysander Spooner

The demoralization that the debasement of the currency left in its wake played a major role in bringing Adolf Hitler into power in 1933.

Henry Hazlitt

No man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire.

Lysander Spooner

The most dangerous diminutions of freedom come from those who are convinced of their moral rectitude.

Daniel Hannan

They who employ force by proxy are as much responsible for that force as though they employed it themselves.

Herbert Spencer

Having a Constitutional political party is a little like telling a car-jacker, "You're not allowed to do what you're doing! And if you don't stop it right now, we are going to ask you to order yourself to be nice! And if that doesn't work, we are going to try to elect a new car-jacker, who we hope will tell himself not to steal our cars! ... But at least we're not like those silly utopian anarchist kooks out there who refuse to work within the system for change! Those crazy people say there should be NO car-jackers at all!

Larken Rose

In the same way that central banking nearly wrecked the world and created one calamity after another, bitcoin can save the world one transaction at a time.It is time for a new beginning.

Jeffrey Tucker

It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.

Alexis de Tocqueville

What makes anyone think that government officials are even trying to protect us? A government is not analogous to a hired security guard. Governments do not come into existence as social service organizations or as private firms seeking to please consumers in a competitive market. Instead, they are born in conquest and nourished by plunder. They are, in short, well-armed gangs intent on organized crime. Yes, rulers have sometimes come to recognize the prudence of protecting the herd they are milking and even of improving its ‘infrastructure’ until the day they decide to slaughter the young bulls, but the idea that government officials seek to promote my interests or yours is little more than propaganda—unless, of course, you happen to belong to the class of privileged tax eaters who give significant support to the government and therefore receive in return a share of the loot.

Robert Higgs

The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

George Santayana

While liberals are in favor of any sexual activity engaged in by two consenting adults, when these consenting adults engage in trade or exchange, the liberals step in to harass, cripple, restrict, or prohibit that trade. And yet both the consenting sexual activity and the trade are similar expressions of liberty in action.

Murray N. Rothbard

When the state itself is held to the same moral standards as everyone else, it dies. And that's a wonderful thing.

Jeffrey Tucker

I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual.

Murray N. Rothbard

Where there is commerce there is peace.

Jeffrey Tucker

People are more willing to support the exercise of authority over themselves when they believe it to be an objective, neutral feature of the natural world. This was the idea behind the concept of the divine right of kings. By making the king appear to be an integral part of God's plan for the world rather than an ordinary human being dominating his fellows by brute force, the public could be more easily persuaded to bow to his authority. However, when the doctrine of divine right became discredited, a replacement was needed to ensure that the public did not view political authority as merely the exercise of naked power. That replacement is the concept of the rule of law.

John Hasnas

There are two and only two ways that any economy can be organized. One is by freedom and voluntary choice—the way of the market. The other is by force and dictation—the way of the State.

Murray N. Rothbard

The very term ‘public utility’ … is an absurd one. Every good is useful ‘to the public,’ and almost every good … may be considered ‘necessary.’ Any designation of a few industries as ‘public utilities’ is completely arbitrary and unjustified.

Murray N. Rothbard

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