Popular

Browse Popular Topics

Quotes by Albert J. Nock

Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you.
– Albert J. Nock
It is interesting to observe that in the year 1935 the average individual's incurious attitude towards the phenomenon of the State is precisely what his attitude was toward the phenomenon of the Church in the year, say, 1500.
– Albert J. Nock
It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own.
– Albert J. Nock
Many now believe that with the rise of the totalitarian State the world has entered upon a new era of barbarism.
– Albert J. Nock
The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.
– Albert J. Nock
The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
– Albert J. Nock
The State always moves slowly and grudgingly towards any purpose that accrues to society's advantage, but moves rapidly and with alacrity towards one that accrues to its own advantage; nor does it ever move towards social purposes on its own initiative, but only under heavy pressure, while its motion towards anti-social purposes is self-sprung.
– Albert J. Nock
The State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal.
– Albert J. Nock
Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.
– Albert J. Nock
The university's business is the conservation of useless knowledge and what the university itself apparently fails to see is that this enterprise is not only noble but indispensable as well, that society can not exist unless it goes on.
– Albert J. Nock
Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.
– Albert J. Nock
Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone.
– Albert J. Nock
Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.
– Albert J. Nock
Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture.
– Albert J. Nock
Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.
– Albert J. Nock
Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.
– Albert J. Nock
Assuming that man has a distinct spiritual nature, a soul, why should it be thought unnatural that under appropriate conditions of maladjustment, his soul might die before his body does or that his soul might die without his knowing it?
– Albert J. Nock
As might be supposed, my parents were quite poor, but we somehow never seemed to lack anything we needed, and I never saw a trace of discontent or a failure in cheerfulness over their lot in life, as indeed over anything.
– Albert J. Nock