Lysander Spooner Quotes About Authority

Quotes about: Authority

• Now a slave is not 'held' by any legal contract, obligation, duty, or authority, which the laws will enforce. He is 'held' only by brute force. One person beats another until the latter will obey him, work for him, if he require it, or do nothing if he require it.

  Lysander Spooner

  Law, Slave, Authority

  Lysander Spooner (1850). “A Defence for Fugitive Slaves”, p.51

• The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing.

  Lysander Spooner

  Men, Doe, Constitution

  Lysander Spooner (1973). “No Treason and a Letter to Thomas F. Bayard”

• The rescue of a person, who is assaulted, or restrained of his liberty, without authority of law, is not only morally, but legally, a meritorious act; for every body is under obligation to go to the assistance of one who is assailed by assassins, robbers, ravishers, kidnappers, or ruffians of any kind.

  Lysander Spooner

  Law, Liberty, Assassins

  Lysander Spooner (1850). “A Defence for Fugitive Slaves”, p.27

• If it be said that the consent of the strongest party in a nation, is all that is necessary to justify the establishment of a government that shall have authority over the weaker party, it may be answered that the most despotic governments in the world rest upon that very principle, viz.: the consent of the strongest party.

  Lysander Spooner

  Party, Government, Principles

• The 'nations,' as they are called, with whom our pretended ambassadors, secretaries, presidents, and senators profess to make treaties, are as much myths as our own. On general principles of law and reason, there are no such 'nations.' ... Our pretended treaties, then, being made with no legitimate or bona fide nations, or representatives of nations, and being made, on our part, by persons who have no legitimate authority to act for us, have intrinsically no more validity than a pretended treaty made by the Man in the Moon with the king of the Pleiades.

  Lysander Spooner

  Kings, Moon, Men

  Lysander Spooner (1971). “The collected works of Lysander Spooner”

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