The nation state has never been associated with peace on earth. Its most powerful recommendation and record is, as a matter of fact, as a wager of wa… - Karl Hess

" "

The nation state has never been associated with peace on earth. Its most powerful recommendation and record is, as a matter of fact, as a wager of war. The history of nation states is written around the dates of war, not peace, around arms and not arts. The organization of warfare without the coercive power of the nation state is simply unimaginable at the scale with which we have become familiar.

English
Collect this quote

About Karl Hess

Karl Hess (born Carl Hess III; 25 May 1923 – 22 April 1994) was an American libertarian and speechwriter for Barry Goldwater. He was also a free-market anarchist political philosopher, editor, welder, motorcycle racer, tax resister, atheist, and libertarian activist. Although fundamentally a libertarian, his career included stints on the Republican right and the New Left.

Limited Time Offer

Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.

Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.

Additional quotes by Karl Hess

There is scarcely anything radical about, for instance, those who say that the poor should have a larger share of the Federal budget. That is reactionary, asking that the institution of state theft be made merely more palatable by distributing its loot to more sympathetic persons.

Limited Time Offer

Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.

[A]fter I got evicted from the Republican Party, I began reading considerably more of the works of American anarchists, thanks largely to Murray Rothbard...and I was just amazed.<p>When I read Emma Goldman, it was as though everything I had hoped that the Republican Party would stand for suddenly came out crystallised. It was a magnificently clear statement. And another interesting things about reading Emma Goldman is that you immediately see that, consciously or not, she's the source of the best in Ayn Rand. She has the essential points that the Ayn Rand philosophy thinks, but without any of this sort of crazy solipsism that Rand is so fond of, the notion that people accomplish everything all in isolation. Emma Goldman understands that there's a social element to even science, but she also writes that all history is a struggle of the individual against the institutions, which of course is what I'd always thought Republicans were saying, and so it goes.<p>In other words, in the Old Right, there were a lot of statements that seemed correct, and they appeal to you emotionally, as well; it was why I was a Republican—isolationist, anti-authoritarian positions, but they're not illuminated by anything more than statement. They just are good statements. But in the writings of the anarchists the same statements are made, but with this long illumination out of experience, analysis, comparison...it's rock-solid, and so I immediately realised that I'd been stumbling around inventing parts of a tradition that was old and thoughtful and already existed, and that's very nice to discover that—I don't think it's necessary to invent everything.

Loading...