Quotes:
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." - Tacitus
"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty." - Bertolt Bercht
"If you wish to keep slaves, you must have all kinds of guards. The cheapest way to have guards is to have the slaves pay taxes to finance their own guards. To fool the slaves, you tell them that they are not slaves and that they have Freedom. You tell them they need Law and Order to protect them against bad slaves. Then you tell them to elect a Government. Give them Freedom to vote and they will vote for their own guards and pay their salary. They will then believe they are Free persons. Then give them money to earn, count and spend and they will be too busy to notice the slavery they are in."
- Alexander Warbucks
"Crime - the Privilege of the State. What is permitted to the State is forbidden to the individual. Such is the maxim of all governments. Machiavelli said it, and history as well as the practice of all contemporary governments bear him out on that point. Crime is the necessary condition of the very existence of the State, and it therefore constitutes its exclusive monopoly, from which it follows that the individual who dares commit a crime is guilty in a two-fold sense: first, he is guilty against human conscience, and, above all, he is guilty against the State in arrogating to himself one of its most precious privileges."
- Bakunin
"[T]he fruits of the earth belong to everyone [...] the earth itself belongs to no one."
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"It's not a matter of whether the war is not real, or if it is, Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact."
-Orwell
"I've just interviewed a permaculture consultant who has been working in Iraq (rebuilding a village on behalf of some obscure aid agency). He said the first thing he noticed was that for the first time ever there was no stamp in his passport and no customs or any kind of government apparatus when he went there. This got him kind of worried about what he was going into but when he got there (Kurdistan) he was amazed to see that the services in the town he was staying in were operating okay and the place hadn't descended into chaos -- far from it in fact.
After a while he started asking people questions like, "How come the water supply is still functioning when there is no agency to run it and how come the power is on too?"
The locals said that all the electricians just decided to get together and make the power system work, and the same thing with plumbers and the water system.
He said there were no banks operating but that wasn't so bad because there were guys on street corners sitting behind a box offering 3 types of currency (in the form of three piles of money with a stone sitting on each one). The gas stations were closed too but at various points on the road there would be a gathering of guys with tractor drawn tanks selling gas. He said he had no idea where they had got the gas from but they were selling it and everyone's cars were running fine.
There was plenty of fresh (organic) food in the markets and life was pretty normal. The only people really suffering were the grain farmers. They had had a fairly normal growing season but the price of grain had gone through the floor thanks to international aid agencies flooding the country with imported grain in an attempt to feed the poor helpless Iraqis.
From the tone of wonder in his voice I think he had just stumbled upon the possibilities of political anarchy." - Aaron
"Naturally the common people don't want war... but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." - Hermann Goering, Nazi and war criminal, 1883-1946
"The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." - The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith.
"We need children as teachers, not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because they're better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap." - The Abolition of Work, Bob Black.
"All the labor-saving inventions ever devised haven't saved a moment's labor." - John Stuart Mill.