"We voluntaryists believe that no true progress can be made until we frankly recognize the great truth that every individual, who lives within the sphere of his own rights, as a self-owner, and has not himself first aggressed upon others by employing force or fraud in his dealings with them [and thus deprived himself of his own rights of self-ownership by aggressing upon these same rights of others], is the only one true owner of his own faculties, and his own property."
Auberon Edward William Molyneux Herbert was an English writer, theorist, philosopher, and 19th century individualist. He was a son of the 3rd Earl of Carnarvon. He was a Liberal Member of Parliament for the two-member constituency of Nottingham from 1870 to 1874.
"Of all the miserable, unprofitable, inglorious wars in the world is the war against words. Let men say just what they like. Let them propose to cut every throat and burn every house - if they so like it. We have nothing to do with a mans words or a mans thoughts, except to put against them better words and better thoughts, and so to win in the great moral and intellectual duel that is always going on, and on which all progress depends."
"Secondly, get rid of all dependence upon the central department. If you do not as yet perceive that public money can not wisely, in any shape, be taken for education, still refuse the grant that the central department offers as a bribe for the acceptance of its mischievous interference. Until individual self-reliance has grown among us, let each town administer education in its own way."
"Who shall count up the evil brood that is born from power - the pitiful fear, the madness, the despair, the overpowering craving for revenge, the treachery, the unmeasured cruelty?"
"Because free countries have affirmed many years ago that a compulsory church rate is immoral and oppressive, for the sake of the burden laid upon individual consciences; and in affirming this truth they have unconsciously affirmed the wider truth, that every tax or rate, forcibly taken from an unwilling person, is immoral and oppressive. The human conscience knows no distinction between church rates and other compulsory rates and taxes. The sin lies in the disregarding of each others convictions, and is not affected by the subject matter of the tax."
"Contrast force and morality with each other. How can an act done under compulsion have any moral element in it, seeing that what is moral is the free act of an intelligent being? If you tie a mans hands there is nothing moral about his not committing murder."
"When once you have plunged into the strife for power, it is the fear of those who are seeking for power over you that so easily persuades to all the great crimes."