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Karl Hess Quotes
1923–1994 United States
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.
United States Activists Philosophers Also known as: Hess, Karl
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11 quotes
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Libertarianism is a people's movement and a liberation movement.
Letter From Washington," The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 (1969)
Radical and revolutionary movements seek not to revise but to revoke. The target of revocation should be obvious. The target is politics itself.”
The fundamental question of politics has always been whether there should be politics.
Foreword (1984) to The Market for Liberty (1970)
Whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder.
It recognizes charity and communal enterprises as voluntary versions of this same ethic. Such a system would be straight barter, except for the widely felt need for a division of labor in which men, voluntarily, accept value tokens such as cash.
Libertarianism is rejected by the modern left — which preaches individualism but practices collectivism. Capitalism is rejected by the modern right-which preaches enterprise but practices protectionism.
Without the state there would be anarchy for that is, despite all the perfervid ravings of the Marxist Left and statist Right, all that anarchy means—the absence of the state, the opportunity for liberty.
Foreword (1984) to The Market for Liberty (1970)
The Federal government of the United States today is guilty of exactly every sort of infringement, abuse, and denial stated as intolerable by the Declaration of Independence. I cannot, in conscience, sanction that government by the payment of taxes.
The thugs and bullies of the Internal Revenue Service, as properly befits their disposition, consider the tax rebels, the tax resister, the worst of all criminals . . . The marauders of the Internal Revenue Service, with strict quotas for how much they have to squeeze from taxpayers, descend on ordinary working people like locusts and plague them even unto death.”
Libertarianism is clearly the most, perhaps the only truly radical movement in America. It grasps the problems of society by the roots. It is not reformist in any sense. It is revolutionary in every sense.
Letter From Washington," The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 (1969)
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