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Albert Jay Nock citations
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Albert Jay Nock est un auteur libertarien et journaliste américain, également théoricien de l'éducation et critique social. Son œuvre, qui représente une critique radicale de l'État, a exercé une influence importante sur le mouvement libertarien et paléo-conservateur aux États-Unis. Nock faisait partie de la Old Right américaine , un groupe d'intellectuels de sensibilité conservatrice et libertarienne, vigoureusement opposés au New Deal et à l'interventionnisme militaire. Wikipedia  

✵ 13. octobre 1870 – 19. août 1945
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Albert Jay Nock: 68 citations0 J'aime

Albert Jay Nock: Citations en anglais

“I had before me the product of two mutually exclusive philosophies. Economism would insist that having made the perfect pencil, Thoreau should make more pencils and sell them for money with which to buy more material to make still more pencils to sell for money to buy still more material, and so on, because the making and selling of pencils is the whole content of life. Thoreau did not believe it is the whole content of life. It was clear that economism's philosophy was the only one which my companion was capable of accepting. Detach him from his particular specialised practice of it, and existence would have no further meaning for him; and in this he was representative of the great bulk of society in this present age.”

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Albert Jay Nock

Source: Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), p. 173

“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.”

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Albert Jay Nock

Source: Our Enemy, the State (1935), p. 51

“The mentality of an army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence; it remains persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile.”

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Albert Jay Nock

Source: Our Enemy, the State (1935), p. 28

“If the modern spirit, whatever that may be, is disinclined towards taking the Lord’s word at its face value (as I hear is the case), we may observe that Isaiah’s testimony to the character of the masses has strong collateral support from respectable Gentile authority. Plato lived into the administration of Eubulus, when Athens was at the peak of its jazz-and-paper era, and he speaks of the Athenian masses with all Isaiah’s fervency, even comparing them to a herd of ravenous wild beasts.”

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Albert Jay Nock

Source: Isaiah's Job (1936), II

“"Democratic" State practice is nothing more or less than State practice. It does not differ from Marxist State practice, Fascist State practice, or any other. 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.”

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Albert Jay Nock

"The Criminality of the State" in American Mercury (March 1939). A similar statement was later made by Jerry Ford

“The practical reason for freedom is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fiber can be developed — we have tried law, compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds, and the result is nothing to be proud of.”

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Albert Jay Nock

"On Doing the Right Thing", in The American Mercury (1925)

“The picture which Isaiah presents of the Judean masses is most unfavorable. In his view, the mass-man — be he high or be he lowly, rich or poor, prince or pauper — gets off very badly. He appears as not only weak-minded and weak-willed, but as by consequence knavish, arrogant, grasping, dissipated, unprincipled, unscrupulous. The mass-woman also gets off badly, as sharing all the mass-man’s untoward qualities, and contributing a few of her own in the way of vanity and laziness, extravagance and foible.”

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Albert Jay Nock

Source: Isaiah's Job (1936), II

“The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses.”

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Albert Jay Nock

The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.
Source: Isaiah's Job (1936), II

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