Robert Nozick Quotes

From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.

If someone picks up a third party and throws him at you down at the bottom of a deep well...may you use your ray gun to disintegrate the falling body before it crushes and kills you?

Political philosophers now must either work within Rawls' theory or explain why not.

Only the refusal to listen guarantees one against being ensnared by the truth.

The minimal state treats us as inviolate individuals, who may not be used in certain ways by others as means or tools or instruments or resources; it treats us as persons having individual rights with the dignity this constitutes. Treating us with respect by respecting our rights, it allows us, individually or with whom we choose, to choose our life and to realize our ends and our conception of ourselves, insofar as we can, aided by the voluntary cooperation of other individuals possessing the same dignity. How dare any state or group of individuals do more. Or less.

Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Taylor, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Merton, Yogi Berra, Allen Ginsberg, Harry Wolfson, Thoreau, Casey Stengel, The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Picasso, Moses, Einstein, Hugh Hefner, Socrates, Henry Ford, Lenny Bruce, Baba Ram Dass, Gandhi, Sir Edmund Hillary, Raymond Lubitz, Buddha, Frank Sinatra, Columbus, Freud, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, Baron Rothschild, Ted Williams, Thomas Edison, H.L. Mencken, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Ellison, Bobby Fischer, Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, you, and your parents. Is there really one kind of life which is best for each of these people?

Some people steal from others, or defraud them, or enslave them, seizing their product and preventing them from living as they choose, or forcibly exclude others from competing in exchanges. None of these are permissible modes of transition from one situation to another.

Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).

If one machine can be used to make X (and nothing else) and another can be used to make Y, and each uses the same raw materials in the same amounts to make a unit of its product, and X is more valuable than Y, then the first machine is more valuable than the second, even if each machine contains the same raw materials and took the same amount of time to make. The first machine, having a more valuable final product, will command a higher price than the second. This may give rise to the illusion that its products are more valuable because it is more valuable. But this gets things backwards. It is more valuable because its products are.

There are few books that set out what a mature person can believe - someone fully grown up, I mean. Aristotle's 'Ethics', Marcus Aurelius's 'Meditations', Montaigne's 'Essays', and the essays of Samuel Johnson come to mind. Even with these, we do not simply accept everything that is said. The author's voice is never our own, exactly; the author's life is never our own. It would be disconcerting, anyway, to find that another person holds precisely our views, responds with our particular sensibility, and thinks the same things important. Still, we gain from these books, weighing and pondering ourselves in their light. These books - and also some less evidently grown-up ones, Thoreau's 'Walden' and Nietzsche's writings, for example - invite or urge us to think along with them, branching in our own directions. We are not identical with the books we read, but neither would we be the same without them.

Though the framework is libertarian and laissez-faire, individual communities within it need not be, and perhaps no community within it will choose to be so. Thus, the characteristics of the framework need not pervade the individual communities. In this laissez-faire system it could turn out that though they are permitted, there are no actually functioning "capitalist" institutions; or that some communities have them and others don't or some communities have some of them, or what you will.

Is not the minimal state, the framework for utopia, an inspiring vision? The minimal state treats us as inviolate individuals, who may not be used in certain ways by others as means or tools or instruments or resources; it treats us as persons having individual right with the dignity this constitutes. Treating us with respect by respecting our rights, it allows us, individually or with whom we please, to choose our life and to realize our ends and our conception of ourselves, insofar as we can, aided by the voluntary cooperation of other individuals possessing the same dignity. How dare any state or group of individuals do more. Or less.

Lacking much historical information and assuming (1) that victims of injustice generally do worse than they otherwise would and (2) that those from the least well-off group in the society have the highest probabilities of being the (descendants of) victims of the most serious injustice who are owed compensation by those who benefited from the injustices, ... then a rough rule of thumb for rectifying injustices might seem to be the following: organize society so as to maximize the position of whatever group ends up least well-off in the society.

With some justice, I think, I could claim that it is all right as a beginning to leave a principle in a somewhat fuzzy state; the primary question is whether something like it will do. This claim, however, would meet a frosty reception from those many proponents of another principle scrutinized in the next chapter, if they knew how much harder I shall be on their principle than I am here on mine. Fortunately, they don't know that yet.

Прудон дал нам описание «неудобств», сопутствующих государству. «Когда вами ПРАВЯТ — это значит, что за вами наблюдают, проверяют, шпионят, вас направляют, преследуют по закону,
пересчитывают, регулируют, регистрируют, внушают идеи, поучают, контролируют, обследуют, оценивают,
хвалят, порицают и командуют создания, не имеющие нужных для этого прав, мудрости и достоинств.
Когда вами ПРАВЯТ — это значит, что при каждой операции, при каждой сделке вас отмечают,
регистрируют, пересчитывают, облагают налогом, штемпелюют, нумеруют, штрафуют, лицензируют, дают
разрешение, указывают, предостерегают, запрещают, улучшают, исправляют, наказывают. Это значит под
предлогом общественной пользы и во имя общих интересов подвергаться сборам, муштре, поборам,
эксплуатации, монополии, вымогательствам, притеснениям, обману, изъятиям; а при малейшем
сопротивлении, при первом слове протеста вас усмиряют, штрафуют, чернят, изнуряют, преследуют,
жестоко обращаются, избивают, разоружают, связывают, душат, бросают в тюрьму, осуждают, выносят
приговор, расстреливают, высылают, приносят в жертву, продают, предают и, в довершение ко всему, над
вами глумятся, издеваются, превращают в посмешище, оскорбляют, бесчестят. Таково государство; такова
его справедливость; таковы его моральные правила» (P. J. Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the
Nineteenth Century, trans. John Beverly Robinson (London: FreedomPress, 1923), pp. 293 — 294, с некоторыми
вставками из перевода Бенджамина Такера в его книге: Benjamin Tucker, Instead of a Book (New York, 1893),
p. 26.