“All the ideals which men generally think are realities, you have learned to see through; you have learned that they are your ideals. Whether you have originated them, which is unlikely, or have accepted somebody else's ideals, makes no difference. They are your ideals just so far as you accept them. The priest is reverend only so far as you reverence him. If you cease to reverence him, he is no longer reverend for you. You have power to make and unmake priests as easily as you can make and unmake gods. You are the one of whom the poet tells, who stands, unmoved, though the universe fall in fragments about you.” (From Philosophical Egoism by John Beverly Robinson located under Philosophical Egoism.)

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“...To Mackay's labors we owe all we know of a man who was as absolutely swallowed up by the years as if he had never existed. But some advanced spirits had read Stirner's book, the most revolutionary ever written, and had felt its influence. Let us name two: Henrik Ibsen and Friedrich Nietzsche. Though the name of Stirner is not quoted by Nietzsche, he nevertheless recommended Stirner to a favorite pupil of his, Professor Baumgartner at Basel University. This was in 1874.” (From Max Stirner by James G. Huneker located under Philosophical Egoism.)

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“There is little doubt that The Ego and His Own is one of the most formidable assaults on authoritarianism ever launched. It may even belong in the first position as such. It is at once a historical document, a pamphlet of the intellectual disturbance of the mid-nineteenth century, and a timeless classic. Its persistent reappearance in one language or another in the last hundred years testifies to the latter.” (From the Introduction to Max Stirner's chef-d'oeuvre by James J. Martin located under Philosophical Egoism.)

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“Consequently, in view of the evanescent nature of power tenure in this country, the frequent unhorsing of the holders and exercisers of State power is looked upon with equanimity and not considered a threat in any way to the State. It is the assault upon the abstract and verbal underpinnings of this institution which draws blood, so to speak. If one can consider all the participants in the struggle to control and use the State as those engaged in a game, then those who seek to destroy the abstract-verbal justification for such ‘play’ are endangering the future course of all the players by riddling the rule books, which describe how such play is to be conducted while giving it a raison d'�tre besides. Those who attack the rationale of the game, and not the players, are its most formidable adversaries.” (From James J. Martin's Introduction to No Treason: The Consitution of No Authority by Lysander Spooner, both located under Individualist Anarchism.)

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“...whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain—that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.” (From the Appendix of No Treason by Lysander Spooner located under Individualist Anarchism.)

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“Those who, by the essence of their belief, are committed to Direct Action only are —just who? Why, the non-resistants; precisely those who do not believe in violence at all! Now do not make the mistake of inferring that I say direct action means non-resistance; not by any means. Direct action may be the extreme of violence, or it may be as peaceful as the waters of the Brook of Shiloa that go softly. What I say is, that the real non-resistants can believe in direct action only, never in political action. For the basis of all political action is coercion; even when the State does good things, it finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through.” (From Direct Action by Voltairine de Cleyre located under Civilian-Based Defense.)

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“The achievements of anarchists have been preponderantly by individuals, and there is a large part of this which remains unknown, though recognized, like the submerged part of an iceberg, and successful because of the consistent and intelligent low-profile tactics of those involved. The fiascoes of many ‘activists’ stand in contradiction to this, spectacular, dramatic, appealing, but the result of involvement in fuzzily-conceived operations mainly encumbered by sentimentalism, martyr complexes and hazy unshared idealism, which latter is one of mankind's great and enduring menaces. (Omitted from this brief survey and analysis is an attempted classification of the trendy ‘anarchist’ of the last 15 years, with a ‘Smash the State’ button on his lapel, with, as likely as not, a check from some branch of the government partially subsidizing his education nestling in his pocket, and a comfortable job in some part of the Establishment shortly after attaining a few post-teenage years.)” (From American Anarchism Revisited by James J. Martin located under Individualist Anarchism.)

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“‘The State’ or ‘The Government’ is idealized by the many as a thing above them, to be reverenced and feared. They call it ‘My Country,’ and if you utter the magic words, they will rush to kill their friends, whom they would not injure by so much as a pin scratch, if they were not intoxicated and blinded by their ideal.” (From Egoism by John Beverly Robinson located under Philsophical Egoism.)

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“...my attitude that seems to disturb the majority of people is my insistence on the biological and genetic basis for the substance of philosophic and ethical views and that's not something I invented, it was something I was exposed to years ago in the writings of the woman radical named Voltairine de Cleyre. She wrote to this effect around the turn of the century—a very much neglected and overlooked lady revolutionist and thinker of great importance in this country. I'm amazed that nobody's discovered her recently. Voltairine de Cleyre advanced the notion that at bottom, if you kept going down to the bottom, in an attempt to search out the reason for the existence of this or that individual attitude toward ethical, philosophical, and related questions, you got back down to a biological basis—what she called temperament—which was not capable of being understood or measured by any kind of rational approach; and that it was a genetic factor.” (From an Interview with James J. Martin located under More Anti-Statism.)

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“But individuality is a thing that cannot be killed. Quietly it may be, but just as certainly, silently, perhaps, as the growth of a blade of grass, it offers its perpetual and unconquerable protest against the dictates of Authority. And this silent, unconquerable, menacing thing, that balked God, provoked him to the use of rack, thumb-screw, stock, hanging, drowning, burning, and other instruments of ‘infinite mercy,’ in the seventeenth century fought a successful battle against that authority which sought to control this fortress of freedom. It established its right to be. It overthrew that portion of government which attempted to guide the brains of men. It ‘broke the corner.’ It declared and maintained the anarchy, or non-rulership, of thought.” (From The Economic Tendency of Freethought by Voltairine de Cleyre located under Anarchism and Feminism.)

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“Sexual correctness is a dogma that permits no dissent. Gender feminists have no scruples about silencing and dismissing the voices of women who disagree. Thus—though individualist feminism is a rich tradition with deep roots in American history—it is virtually ignored. This bibliographic essay is a pioneering step toward reclaiming an aspect of feminist history that the orthodoxy would rather remain in the dustbin.” (From Brief Bibliographic Essay by Wendy McElroy located under Anarchism and Feminism.)

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“She argued the impossibility of government promoting knowledge by pointing out: ‘It seems to be generally forgotten by those who favor state aid to science that aid so given is not and cannot be aid to Science, but to particular doctrine or dogmas, and that, where this aid is given, it requires almost a revolution to introduce a new idea.’ Such an arrangement of government patronage creates ‘a great many big idle queens at the expense of the workers.’” (From Gertrude Kelly: Forgotten Feminist by Wendy McElroy located under Anarchism and Feminism.)

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“Before World War II, research and development funding for the sciences, public and private, amounted to about $250 million per year. By 1993, the federal share alone was $76 billion. And what has it bought us? For the $45 billion of taxpayer money spent on AIDS so far, HIV researchers still use statistical methodologies shown by their inventors to be invalid and still conduct experiments without any controls. They take causes for effects, correlations for causations, and constants for variables. Most important, they haven't stopped AIDS. What they have done is successfully instilled fear into human sexual relations—an amorphous fear, which most AIDS professionals as well as journalists argue has been valuable. I doubt even George Orwell could have imagined that an autocratic regime would be able to successfully equate sex with death at the end of the millennium. What the government has bought with this money is a culture of conformity, whereby only HIV research is funded, creating the appearance that all researchers believe HIV is the cause of AIDS.” (From Blinded by Science by David Rasnick located under HIV=AIDS Controversy.)

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“Null introduced [Arthur] Ashe to the evidence of AZT's toxicity and against the HIV-AIDS hypothesis, desperately trying to convince him to halt the therapy. For the next ten months, Ashe ‘wrestled with the possibility of breaking away from the medical establishment to seek alternative treatment for AIDS,’ according to one columnist. Ashe never met Peter Duesberg, but became familiar with his arguments. ‘He read everything; he studied what we gave him and asked lots of questions,’ recalled Null. In October, Ashe announced the lessons he was learning in a column he wrote for the Washington Post: ‘The confusion for AIDS patients like me is that there is a growing school of thought that HIV may not be the sole cause of AIDS, and that standard treatments such as AZT actually make matters worse. That there may very well be unknown cofactors but that the medical establishment is too rigid to change the direction of basic research and/or clinical trials.’ But psychological pressure stopped Ashe short from rejecting AZT. As Null stated, ‘He wanted to do it, but he would say, “What will I tell my doctors?”’” (From Stories of Those Who Believed in AZT by Peter Duesberg located under HIV=AIDS Controversy.)

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“Without doubt the most significant impact of participation in World War One was upon the domestic scene. The Versailles Treaty, the League of Nations, the Briand-Kellogg Pact and the various other involvements in world affairs in the subsequent two decades aside, it was by far the centralizing and bureaucratizing of the United States in 1917-19 which represents the residuary and long term substance. The most remarkable aspect of this matter was the gathering together of the national economy under six great administrative boards, an experiment in economic totalitarianism which was not lost on the politically percipient, to be revived in various forms and in other contexts ever since.” (From The Saga of Hog Island by James J. Martin located under Anti-war Propaganda.)

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“However tragic and regrettable, the assassination of President Kennedy was a relatively simple crime as compared to perhaps the most lethal and complicated public crime of modern times, our entry into World War II. This resulted in the immediate loss of over thirty million lives, an ultimate cost of more than fifteen trillion dollars, incredible suffering, and a military-scientific-technological-industrial aftermath which may wipe out the human race; and the concomitant result: a conditioned outlook whereby millions favor war — exerted externally upon a foreign ‘enemy’ and internally upon the taxpayers — as the means to insure peace.” (From The Public Stake in Revisionism by Harry Elmer Barnes located under Anti-war Propaganda.)

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“What, then, is a little matter like a treaty to the French or British State? Merely a scrap of paper—Bethmann-Hollweg described it exactly. Why be astonished when the German or Russian State murders its citizens? The American State would do the same thing under the same circumstances. In fact, eighty years ago it did murder a great many of them for no other crime in the world but that they did not wish to live under its rule any longer; and if that is a crime, then the colonists led by G. Washington were hardened criminals and the Fourth of July is nothing but a cutthroat's holiday.” (From The Criminal State by Albert J. Nock located under More Anti-Statism.)