Karl Hess citations (25 citations) | Citations célèbres

“Libertarianism is rejected by the modern left — which preaches individualism but practices collectivism. Capitalism is rejected by the modern right-which preaches enterprise but practices protectionism.”

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Karl Hess

“The Death of Politics”, Playboy (March, 1969).

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

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Karl Hess

Barry Goldwater's speech http://www.c-span.org/video/?4018-1/goldwater-1964-acceptance-speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination, written by Karl Hess, delivered 16 July 1964, San Francisco.
Contexte: I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

“And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

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Karl Hess

Barry Goldwater's speech http://www.c-span.org/video/?4018-1/goldwater-1964-acceptance-speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination, written by Karl Hess, delivered 16 July 1964, San Francisco.
Contexte: I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

“Libertarianism is clearly the most, perhaps the only truly radical movement in America. It grasps the problems of society by the roots. It is not reformist in any sense. It is revolutionary in every sense.”

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Karl Hess

"Letter From Washington," http://www.panarchy.org/hess/libertarianism.html The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 http://web.archive.org/web/20071201123614/http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_06_15.pdf (15 June 1969), p. 2

“Libertarianism is a people's movement and a liberation movement.”

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Karl Hess

"Letter From Washington," http://www.panarchy.org/hess/libertarianism.html The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 http://web.archive.org/web/20071201123614/http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_06_15.pdf (15 June 1969), p. 2
Contexte: Libertarianism is a people's movement and a liberation movement. It seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people may voluntarily associate, dis-associate, and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives. This means a truly free market in everything from ideas to idiosyncrasies. It means people free collectively to organize the resources of their immediate community or individualistically to organize them; it means the freedom to have a community-based and supported judiciary where wanted, none where not, or private arbitration services where that is seen as most desirable. The same with police. The same with schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and pensions. Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status.

“The fundamental question of politics has always been whether there should be politics.”

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Karl Hess

Foreword (1984) to The Market for Liberty (1970)
Contexte: The most interesting political questions throughout history have been whether or not humans will be ruled or free, whether they will be responsible for their actions as individuals or left irresponsible as members of society, and whether they can live in peace by volitional agreements alone.The fundamental question of politics has always been whether there should be politics.

“Libertarians, in short, simply do not believe that theft is proper whether it is committed in the name of a state, a class, a crises, a credo, or a cliche.This is a far cry from sharing common ground with those who want to create a society in which super capitalists are free to amass vast holdings and who say that that is ultimately the most important purpose of freedom.”

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Karl Hess

"Letter From Washington," http://www.panarchy.org/hess/libertarianism.html The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 http://web.archive.org/web/20071201123614/http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_06_15.pdf (15 June 1969), p. 2

“There is scarcely anything radical about, for instance, those who say that the poor should have a larger share of the Federal budget. That is reactionary, asking that the institution of state theft be made merely more palatable by distributing its loot to more sympathetic persons.”

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Karl Hess

"Letter From Washington," http://www.panarchy.org/hess/libertarianism.html The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 http://web.archive.org/web/20071201123614/http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_06_15.pdf (15 June 1969), p. 2

“Laissez-faire capitalism, or anarchocapitalism, is simply the economic form of the libertarian ethic. Laissez-faire capitalism encompasses the notion that men should exchange goods and services, without regulation, solely on the basis of value for value. It recognizes charity and communal enterprises as voluntary versions of this same ethic. Such a system would be straight barter, except for the widely felt need for a division of labor in which men, voluntarily, accept value tokens such as cash and credit. Economically, this system is anarchy, and proudly so.”

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Karl Hess

"The Death of Politics", essay in Playboy (March 1969) http://fare.tunes.org/books/Hess/dop.html; also available in Hess's autobiography, Mostly on the Edge.

“Without the state there would be anarchy for that is, despite all the perfervid ravings of the Marxist Left and statist Right, all that anarchy means—the absence of the state, the opportunity for liberty.”

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Karl Hess

Foreword (1984) to The Market for Liberty (1970)

“Narrator: What’s your relationship with the IRS these days?
Karl Hess: [laughs] Miserable. Terrible.
Narrator: And why's that?
Karl Hess: Well, you know, they ask every now and then when I'm going to behave myself and I tell them never and I…
Narrator: Are you not paying federal taxes?
Karl Hess: Yeah, nothing.
Narrator: I guess they don’t take too kindly to that?
Karl Hess: No, they think it’s terrible.
Therese Hess: On the other hand, they're not being very active about it right now.
Karl Hess: Well, no, the last time he was here…
Therese Hess: It's like it's no fun anymore or something.
Karl Hess: Something like that. The local people seem to take more of a kindly view as though they really think it's a rotten thing. I'm not doing anybody any harm. And…they seem to be more sensitive. [laughs] Or decent somehow. I don't…I don't know, the federal people are…
Narrator: What can they do?
Karl Hess: Put me in jail.”

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Karl Hess

Anarchism in America http://alexpeak.com/art/films/aia/ (15 January 1983)

“The nation state has never been associated with peace on earth. Its most powerful recommendation and record is, as a matter of fact, as a wager of war. The history of nation states is written around the dates of war, not peace, around arms and not arts. The organization of warfare without the coercive power of the nation state is simply unimaginable at the scale with which we have become familiar.”

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Karl Hess

Foreword (1984) to The Market for Liberty (1970)

“[Republicans in Hess's youth] represented the only strong anti-imperalist political position. Anti-imperialist? Republicans? Uh-huh. But Republicans were not smart enough to call it that. They let it be labeled isolationism, as though they wanted the United States to sneak off the world stage, slam the doors, and bolt the windows. The underlying Republican argument, that we should trade with everyone but not interfere with or intervene in their internal politics, was lost behind that unattractive label.”

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Karl Hess

Jeff Riggenbach, "Karl Hess and the Death of Politics," http://mises.org/library/karl-hess-and-death-politics-0 ( text http://mises.org/library/karl-hess-and-death-politics) The Libertarian Tradition (6 May 2010).

“Libertarians are concerned, first and foremost, with that most valuable of properties, the life of each individual. … Property rights pertaining to material objects are seen by libertarians as stemming from and…secondary to the right to own, direct, and enjoy one’s own life and those appurtenances thereto which may be acquired without coercion.”

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Karl Hess

"Letter From Washington," http://www.panarchy.org/hess/libertarianism.html The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 http://web.archive.org/web/20071201123614/http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_06_15.pdf (15 June 1969), p. 2

“Radical and revolutionary movements seek not to revise but to revoke. The target of revocation should be obvious. The target is politics itself.”

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Karl Hess

“The Death of Politics”, Playboy (March, 1969).

“[A]fter I got evicted from the Republican Party, I began reading considerably more of the works of American anarchists, thanks largely to Murray Rothbard…and I was just amazed.When I read Emma Goldman, it was as though everything I had hoped that the Republican Party would stand for suddenly came out crystallised. It was a magnificently clear statement. And another interesting things about reading Emma Goldman is that you immediately see that, consciously or not, she's the source of the best in Ayn Rand. She has the essential points that the Ayn Rand philosophy thinks, but without any of this sort of crazy solipsism that Rand is so fond of, the notion that people accomplish everything all in isolation. Emma Goldman understands that there’s a social element to even science, but she also writes that all history is a struggle of the individual against the institutions, which of course is what I’d always thought Republicans were saying, and so it goes.In other words, in the Old Right, there were a lot of statements that seemed correct, and they appeal to you emotionally, as well; it was why I was a Republican—isolationist, anti-authoritarian positions, but they’re not illuminated by anything more than statement. They just are good statements. But in the writings of the anarchists the same statements are made, but with this long illumination out of experience, analysis, comparison…it's rock-solid, and so I immediately realised that I'd been stumbling around inventing parts of a tradition that was old and thoughtful and already existed, and that's very nice to discover that—I don't think it's necessary to invent everything.”

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Karl Hess

Anarchism in America http://alexpeak.com/art/films/aia/ (15 January 1983)

“The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf–master relationship to political–economic power concentrations.”

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Karl Hess

"Letter From Washington," http://www.panarchy.org/hess/libertarianism.html The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 http://web.archive.org/web/20071201123614/http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_06_15.pdf (15 June 1969), p. 2

“We have the illusion of freedom only because so few ever try to exercise it. Try it sometime. Try to save your home from the highway crowd, or to work a trade without the approval of the goons, or to open a little business without a permit, or to grow a crop without a quota, or to educate your child the way you want to, or to not have a child. We all have the freedom of a balloon floating in a pin factory.”

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Karl Hess

As quoted in “From Far Right to Far Left,” Tames Boyd, The New York Times Magazine (Sunday) (Dec. 6, 1970) p. 305

“Whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder.”

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Karl Hess

As quoted in Why Americans Hate Politics, by E.J. Dionne, Jr., Simon & Schuster (2004) p. 267.

“Well, it's hard to tell on the basis of the Party's rhetoric, after all they're running for state ofﬁce, but my experience is that most people who are in the Libertarian Party have pretty decent anarchist impulses, even if they do not say they are anarchists—most of them will say they are libertarians, at any rate.And one thing that is useful is that they have a fairly well-reﬁned analysis of why they aren't conservative. It took the New Left to do a proper analysis on American liberals, it seems to me, and I suspect that the libertarians are doing the best analysis of American conservatives.I think that they are quite good people, and that the Party contains within it probably more people of an anarchist tendency than any other organisation in the country.”

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Karl Hess

Anarchism in America http://alexpeak.com/art/films/aia/ (15 January 1983)

“Big business in America today and for some years has been openly at war with competition and, thus, at war with laissez-faire capitalism. … The left's attack on corporate capitalism is, when examined, an attack on economic forms possible only in collusion between authoritarian government and bureaucratized, nonentrepreneurial business. It is unfortunate that many New Leftists are so uncritical as to accept this premise as indicating that all forms of capitalism are bad…”

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Karl Hess

"The Death of Politics", Playboy magazine (March 1969)

“The most interesting political questions throughout history have been whether or not humans will be ruled or free, whether they will be responsible for their actions as individuals or left irresponsible as members of society, and whether they can live in peace by volitional agreements alone.The fundamental question of politics has always been whether there should be politics.”

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Karl Hess

Foreword (1984) to The Market for Liberty (1970)

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Help us translate this quote

Karl Hess

Barry Goldwater's speech http://www.c-span.org/video/?4018-1/goldwater-1964-acceptance-speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination, written by Karl Hess, delivered 16 July 1964, San Francisco.