Karl Hess Quotes (1923-1994)

This is a far cry from sharing common ground with those who want to create a society in which super capitalists are free to amass vast holdings and who say that that is ultimately the most important purpose of freedom.”

The fundamental question of politics has always been whether there should be politics.”

Much of that property is stolen.  Much is of dubious title.  All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf–master relationship to political–economic power concentrations.”

And one thing that is useful is that they have a fairly well-refined analysis of why they aren't conservative.  It took the New Left to do a proper analysis on American liberals, it seems to me, and I suspect that the libertarians are doing the best analysis of American conservatives.

I think that they are quite good people, and that the Party contains within it probably more people of an anarchist tendency than any other organisation in the country.”

When I read Emma Goldman, it was as though everything I had hoped that the Republican Party would stand for suddenly came out crystallised.  It was a magnificently clear statement.  And another interesting things about reading Emma Goldman is that you immediately see that, consciously or not, she's the source of the best in Ayn Rand.  She has the essential points that the Ayn Rand philosophy thinks, but without any of this sort of crazy solipsism that Rand is so fond of, the notion that people accomplish everything all in isolation.  Emma Goldman understands that there's a social element to even science, but she also writes that all history is a struggle of the individual against the institutions, which of course is what I'd always thought Republicans were saying, and so it goes.

In other words, in the Old Right, there were a lot of statements that seemed correct, and they appeal to you emotionally, as well; it was why I was a Republican—isolationist, anti-authoritarian positions, but they're not illuminated by anything more than statement.  They just are good statements.  But in the writings of the anarchists the same statements are made, but with this long illumination out of experience, analysis, comparison...it's rock-solid, and so I immediately realised that I'd been stumbling around inventing parts of a tradition that was old and thoughtful and already existed, and that's very nice to discover that—I don't think it's necessary to invent everything.”