The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control.

But which is the State's essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.

He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man ... or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.

Commanded love of all men indiscriminately is an obliteration of distinction between love and hate, and therefore is not love at all.

If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.

The Anarchists answer that the abolition of the State will leave in existence a defensive association, resting no longer on a compulsory but on a voluntary basis, which will restrain invaders by any means that may prove necessary.

In times past...it was my habit to talk glibly of the right of man to land. It was a bad habit, and I long ago sloughed it off. Man's only right to land is his might over it. If his neighbor is mightier than he and takes the land from him, then the land is his neighbor's, until the latter is dispossessed by one mightier still.