Albert J. Nock
Albert J. Nock
Albert Jay Nockwas an influential American libertarian author, educational theorist, Georgist, and social critic of the early and middle 20th century...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth13 October 1870
CountryUnited States of America
believe people may
If you do not want the State to act like a criminal, you must disarm it as you would a criminal; you must keep it weak. The State will always be criminal in proportion to its strength; a weak State will always be as criminal as it can be, or dare be, but if it is kept down to the proper limit of weakness - which, by the way, is a vast deal lower limit than people are led to believe - its criminality may be safely got on with.
mouths way degenerates
By consequence I hold that no one ever did, or can do, anything for "society."... Comte invented the term altruism as an antonym for egoism , and it found its way at once into everyone's mouth, although it is utterly devoid of meaning, since it points to nothing that ever existed in mankind; This hybrid or rather this degenerate form of hedonism served powerfully to invest collectivism 's principles with a specious moral sanction, and collectivists naturally made the most of it.
political mind mass
Above all things the mass-mind is most bitterly resentful of superiority. It will not tolerate the thought of an elite; and under a political system of universal suffrage, the mass-mind is enabled to make its antipathies prevail.
phrases coins sometimes
The glossary of politics is so full of euphemistic words and phrases — as in the nature of things it must be — that one would suppose politicians must sometimes strain their wits to coin them.
thinking law ordinary
Americans have a strange notion that the ordinary laws of economics do not apply to them. So doubtless they will think they are prosperous if the boom starts, and that deficits and indebtedness are merely signs of how prosperous they are.
simple government use
The simple truth is that our businessmen do not want a government that will let business alone. They want a government they can use.
taken office towns
Driving jobholders out of office is like the old discredited policy of driving prostitutes out of town. Their places are immediately taken by others who are precisely like them.
views agreement order
The State did not originate in any form of social agreement, or with any disinterested view of promoting order and justice. Far otherwise. The State originated in conquest and confiscation, as a device for maintaining the stratification of society permanently into two classes-an owning and exploiting class, relatively small, and a propertyless dependent class. . . . No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose than to enable the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another.
attitude average years
It is interesting to observe that in the year 1935 the average individual's incurious attitude towards the phenomenon of the State is precisely what his attitude was toward the phenomenon of the Church in the year, say, 1500. It does not appear to have occurred to the Church-citizen of that day, any more than it occurs to the State-citizen of the present, to ask what sort of institution it was that claimed his allegiance.
useless body may
Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.
country civilization people
The civilization of a country consists in the quality of life that is lived there, and this quality shows plainest in the things that people choose to talk about when they talk together, and in the way they choose to talk about them.
army march adolescence
The mentality of an army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence; it remains persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile.
units humans can-do
The only thing that the psychically-human being can do to improve society is to present society with one improved unit.
benefits instinct should
When a beggar asks us for a quarter, our instinct is to say that the State has already confiscated our quarter for his benefit, and he should go to the State about it.