Legal plunder has two roots: One, as we have just seen, is in human selfishness; the other is in false philanthropy.

People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.

The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.

Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter, by peaceful or revolutionary means, into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.

This question of legal plunder must be settled once and for all, and there are only three ways to settle it: (1) The few plunder the many. (2) Everybody plunders everybody. (3) Nobody plunders anybody.

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.