Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom. In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own. The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave. All men's instincts, all their impulses in life, are efforts to increase their freedom. Wealth and poverty, health and disease, culture and ignorance, labor and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice, are all terms for greater or less degree of freedom.
Physical violence is the basis of authority.
Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us. And it is time for people to understand that governments not only are not necessary, but are harmful and most highly immoral institutions, in which a self-respecting, honest man cannot and must not take part. Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. Every successful revolution puts on in time the robe of the tyrant it has deposed. Servitude degrades people to such a point that they come to like it.