“Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime… It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, weather the property of citizen or of alien. There is, for example, no human right, natural or Constitutional, that we have not seen nullified by the United States Government. Of all the crimes that are committed for gain or revenge, there is not one that we have not seen it commit—murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud, criminal collusion and connivance.”

— Albert Jay Nock

Source: On Doing the Right Thing and Other Essays (1928), p. 143

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Albert Jay Nock 68

American journalist 1870–1945

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