Hans-Hermann Hoppe Quotes

When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.

The state is an instrument in the hands of the ruling class for suppressing the resistance of its class enemies.

The ordered organization of coercion we call the State.

The history of government is the history of two conflicting principles: one is the supreme importance of the State; the other is the supreme importance of the individual.

Government is force.

Extensive and organized power over large populations does not suffice to make a nation

All governments must maintain power by consent. Not by coercion.

...a state is not the same thing as a society ... A state is an organization of power on a territorial basis.

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

The fundamental question of political philosophy, one that precedes questions about how the state should be organized, is whether there should be any state at all. Why not have anarchy?

The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State.

What is this thing we call government? Is it anything but organized violence? The law orders you to obey, and if you don't obey, it will compel you by force - all governments, all law and authority finally rest on force and violence, on punishment or fear of punishment.

Where there is no common power, there is no law

Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

When mankind first saw the necessity of government, it is probable that many had conceived the desire of ruling.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.

Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate use of force in a territory, might be among the biggest violence reduction techniques ever invented.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

It's no small irony that the government inevitably and invariably ends up promoting precisely that which they would most like to repress.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.

The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

Laws are the terms by which independent and isolated men united to form a society, once they tired of living in a perpetual state of war where the enjoyment of liberty was rendered useless by the uncertainty of its preservation. They sacrificed a portion of this liberty so that they could enjoy the remainder in security and peace.

When man lives under government, he is fallen, his worth is gone, and his nature tarnished.