Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. > Quotes

“It isn't a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state's goodness and its concern for our well-being. The real explanation is less flattering. If the government's propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus. They'll fasten the chains to their own ankles.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

“If something is wrong for you or me, it is also wrong for the cop, the soldier, the mayor, the governor, the general, the Fed chairman, the president. Theft does not become acceptable when they call it taxation, counterfeiting when they call it monetary policy, kidnapping when they call it the draft, mass murder when they call it foreign policy. We understand that it is never acceptable to wield violence nor the threat of violence against the innocent, whether by the mugger or the politician.”
― Lew Rockwell

“Once you understand the economics of the Austrian School and the philosophy of liberty in the tradition of Rothbard, you never look at anything – not the state, the media, the central bank, the political class, nothing – the same way again.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

“The state, rather, is a parasitic institution that lives off the wealth of its subjects, concealing its anti-social, predatory nature beneath a public-interest veneer.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto

“The danger to a free society is not the guns owned by the citizens but an unconstrained government, especially one that is better armed than the public. An armed society is a self-governing society, just as a disarmed people are vulnerable to arbitrary power of every kind.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell

“The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively “peaceful” the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society. Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto

“Why does socialist central planning not work? The means of production are not held privately, so there cannot be any exchange markets for them and therefore no exchange ratios established. That means there is no way to calculate profit and loss. Without profit and loss, there is no way to assess the tradeoffs associated with alternative uses of resources.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto

“The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative.” I submit to you that this is the prevailing ideology in the United States today. This nation conceived in liberty has been kidnapped by the fascist State.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto

“It was the US that turned this country into a killing field. Why won’t we face this? Why won’t we take responsibility? The reason has to do with this mysterious thing called nationalism, which makes an ideological religion of the nation’s wars. We are god-like liberators. They are devil-like terrorists. No amount of data or contrary information seems to make a dent in this irreligious faith. So it is in every country and in all times. Here is the intellectual blindness that war generates.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto

“As the great nineteenth-century abolitionist and libertarian Lysander Spooner pointed out, the primary motive of Lincoln and the war party was to preserve and consolidate Northern control of the Southern economy. The Southern states could not be allowed to evade the tariff, a key element of the mercantilist American system that Lincoln favored.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto

“But won’t crime go up if we abandon our prison system? Let Robert Ingersoll answer: The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumb-screws and racks, with hangmen and headsmen — and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities and crimes have accomplished little for the preservation of property or life. It is safe to say that governments have committed far more crimes than they have prevented. As long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto

“Because American cryptographers had also broken the Japanese naval code, the leaders in Washington also knew that Japan’s “measures” would include an attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet they withheld this critical information from the commanders in Hawaii, who might have headed off the attack or prepared themselves to defend against it.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto

“Anarchy is precisely the reverse of chaos.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto

“It is clear that Lincoln’s decision to use force against the Southern states that had seceded did not meet the just war criteria. States under the Constitution had the legal right to secede.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto

“Almost everyone now accepts, at least implicitly, the claim that a different set of moral rules applies to the State, or that to one degree or another the State is above morality as traditionally understood.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto

“We know that the free market supplies goods and services far better than any alternative system. Why are protection and defense any different? Rothbard asked this question in 1949, and thinking about it made him an anarchist.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto

“In the long run even the most despotic governments with all their brutality and cruelty are no match for ideas. Eventually the ideology that has won the support of the majority will prevail and cut the ground from under the tyrant’s feet. Then the oppressed many will rise in rebellion and overthrow their masters.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto

“Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police State as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive State the unlimited master of society.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto