The law, as to preserve life is that of individuals, is a set of rules and practices … intended to appropriate to the law-makers the produce of those… - Thomas Hodgskin

Our leaders invent nothing but new taxes, and conquer nothing but the pockets of their subjects.

Among the legislative classes embodied into, and constituting the government, we must place the landed aristocracy. In fact, the landed aristocracy and the government are one—the latter being nothing more than the organized means of preserving the power and privileges of the former.

The natural science of wealth relates only to man, and knows nothing of the distinctions between nobles and peasants, kings and slaves, legislators and subjects; and if we are led to conclude at every step of our investigations, that the fundamental principles of political society as well as the administrative acts of most governments are hostile to the principles of this science, must we wilfully suppress our conclusions,—must we turn aside from the light of truth, that the wisdom of our ancestors, or the peculiar wisdom of the few hundred beings in whose hands the different governments of the world are lodged, may remain for ever the only objects of human adoration?