“The law is an opinion with a gun.” — Stefan Molyneux

“The order-follower always bears more moral culpability than the order-giver, because the order-follower is the one who actually performed the action, and in taking such action, actually brought the resultant harm into physical manifestation.” — Mark Passio

“The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.” — Emma Goldman

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.” — Thomas Jefferson

“Socialism, or communism as it is sometimes called, is merely a secular religion, where the State becomes a god.” — Stefan Molyneux

“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.” — James Madison

“A man’s natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, or by millions, calling themselves a government.” — Lysander Spooner

“The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” — Alexander Hamilton

“The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don’t know what to do.” — John Holt

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” — Hannah Arendt

“People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” — Albert Camus

“As for ‘taking sides’ — the choice, it seems to me, is no longer between two users of violence, two systems of dictatorship. Violence and dictatorship cannot produce peace and liberty; they can only produce the results of violence and dictatorship, results with which history has made us only too sickeningly familiar. The choice now is between militarism and pacifism. To me, the necessity of pacifism seems absolutely clear.” — Aldous Huxley

“All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.” — Aldous Huxley

“Awareness without action is worthless.” — Phil McGraw

“Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.” — Henry David Thoreau

“War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Government is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.” — Frank Zappa

This is one of the examples of domestic resistance to Nazism that I referenced in my most recent article. While I would not discredit their contribution, them also facing the death penalty if they refused to participate, I feel it’s criminal that there is much wider knowledge of the actions taken by those compelled by conscription to fight tyranny (i.e. government military intervention) than those who chose to fight it on principle despite the odds (and with much more to lose). There should be much more focus on bottom-up history, or what historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, author of Everyday Stalinism, calls “history from below”.