The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
When plunder becomes a way of life, men create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim – when he defends himself – as a criminal.
Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.
The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.