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

We cannot but be astonished at the ease with which men resign themselves to ignorance about what is most important for them to know; and we may be certain that they are determined to remain invincibly ignorant if they once come to consider it as axiomatic that there are no absolute principles.

As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose - that it may violate property instead of protecting it - then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder.

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.

The solution of the social problem is in liberty.

If everyone enjoyed the unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the fruits of his labor, social progress would be ceaseless, uninterrupted, and unfailing.

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.