Derek Worley

“The sovereign people, legislators, and reformers, see in public offices, to speak plainly, only opportunities for pecuniary advancement. And, because it regards them as a source of profit, it decrees the eligibility of citizens. For of what use would this precaution be, if there were nothing to gain by it? No one would think of ordaining that none but astronomers and geographers should be pilots, nor of prohibiting stutterers from acting at the theatre and the opera. The nation was still aping the kings: like them it wished to award the lucrative positions to its friends and flatterers. Unfortunately, and this last feature completes the resemblance, the nation did not control the list of livings; that was in the hands of its agents and representatives. They, on the other hand, took care not to thwart the will of their gracious sovereign.”
― Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property?

“— Eh bien ! vous êtes démocrate ? — Non. — Quoi ! vous seriez monarchique ? — Non. — Constitutionnel ? — Dieu m’en garde. — Vous êtes donc aristocrate ? — Point du tout. — Vous voulez un gouvernement mixte ? — Encore moins. Qu’êtes-vous donc ? — Je suis anarchiste. — Je vous entends : vous faites de la satire ; ceci est à l’adresse du gouvernement. — En aucune façon : vous venez d’entendre ma profession de foi sérieuse et mûrement réfléchie ; quoique très ami de l’ordre, je suis, dans toute la force du terme, anarchiste.”
― Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

“When politics and home life have become one and the same, when economic problems have been solved in such a way that individual and collective interests are identical – all constraints having disappeared – it is evident that we will be in a state of total liberty or anarchy.”
― Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property?

“This brings us to Anarchism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished. When Warren and Proudhon, in prosecuting their search for justice to labor, came face to face with the obstacle of class monopolies, they saw that these monopolies rested upon Authority, and concluded that the thing to be done was, not to strengthen this Authority and thus make monopoly universal, but to utterly uproot Authority and give full sway to the opposite principle, Liberty, by making competition, the antithesis of monopoly, universal.”
― Benjamin R. Tucker, Selected essays and writings on Individualist anarchism & Liberty: