“The State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal.”
"The Criminality of the State" in American Mercury (March 1939) http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~ckank/FultonsLair/013/nock/criminality.html
Context: The State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation—that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class — that is, for a criminal purpose.
No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose. Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient.
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Albert Jay Nock 68
American journalist 1870–1945Related quotes
Source: Out of Step: The Autobiography of an Individualist (1962), p. 147
"The Criminality of the State" in American Mercury (March 1939). A similar statement was later made by Jerry Ford
“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
Speech to Chamber of Deputies (9 December 1928), quoted in Propaganda and Dictatorship (2007) by Marx Fritz Morstein, p. 48
1920s
“Therefore we demand as a fundamental law of the state: …”
The obligation for interest is replaced by the obligation to repay the principal; thus after 20 or 25 years, depending on the interest-rate, the lent capital is repaid and the debt retired. ...
Through intensive enlightenment of the people, it is to be made clear to the people that money is and should be nothing other than a voucher for completed labor; that while every highly developed economy of course has need of money as a medium of exchange, the function of money also ends with that, and in no case should money be lent a supramundane power to grow of itself by means of interest, at the expense of productive labor.
"Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Interest on Money" (1919)
“Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.”
Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 126
“It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and to restrain the violence of the state.”
Noam Chomsky, in John Duffett International War Crimes Tribunal: Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings. Simon and Schuster, 1970. p. xxiv; Republished at Foreword http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1971----.htm in chomsky.info, accessed May 23, 2014.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1970s
Context: It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and to restrain the violence of the state. Those who choose to disregard this responsibility can justly be accused of complicity in war crimes, which is itself designated as ‘a crime under international law’ in the principles of the Charter of Nuremberg.
Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (2010)