| Grown men do not need leaders. Democracy - rule by the people - sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in America. The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power to coerce others. All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob. The true unacknowledged purpose of capitol punishment is to inspire fear and awe - fear and awe of the state All governments require enemy governments The best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. The purpose and function of government is not to preside over change but to prevent change. By political methods when unavoidable, by violence when convenient. If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the government and outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws. Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward. Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners. Anarchy works, Italy has proved it for a thousand years. The tragedy of modern war is not so much that young men die but that they die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals. The nuclear bomb took all the fun out of war. First day in the U.S. army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings, if only for an hour. Whenever I read Time or Newsweek or such magazines, I wash my hands afterward. But how to wash off the small but odious stain such reading leaves on the mind? Children are born with an innate sense of justice; it usually takes twelve years of public schooling and four more years of college to beat it out of them. We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal. As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases. Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it. Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature, they distort it. You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings. Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters created by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines. War? The one war I'd be happy to join is the war against officers. In social affairs, I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military-industrial civilization will soon collapse. I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. And know and love my own people, too, the swine. I'm a patriot. A dangerous man. Why I oppose the nuclear arms race: I prefer the human race. Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as Rule of Law. The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws. In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students. Our "neoconservatives" are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell. Truth is always the enemy of power, and power the enemy of truth. The "terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years. Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best. How to overthrow the system: brew your own beer; kick in your TV; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the porch whenever you bloody well feel like it. Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commisar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff (this is a modified Voltaire quote) |