Bob Black Quotations

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps

People aren't as stupid as the politicians think. More and more of us are laughing off our 'civic duty' to vote, rejecting the role of compulsory constituent.

Law is any application for the official use of coercion that succeeds.

I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance.

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment.

Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced.

We're going to take this one year at a time. Our kids have a lot of confidence that they can swim fast when they have to.

Unlike side issues like unemployment, unions, and minimum-wage laws, the subject of work itself is almost entirely absent from libertarian literature. Most of what little there is consists of Randite rantings against parasites, barely distinguishable from the invective inflicted on dissidents by the Soviet press....

A [typical] worker is a part-time slave.

Leisure is non-work for the sake of work. Leisure is the time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world.

Looking for work sounds almost as bad as finding it.

I'm the out-of-court jester who won't settle, I up the vigilante, I'm a law unto myself but break it anyway! I made a forced landing on the Moebius Strip and now I want to know, which side are you on?

Cleansed of its leftist residues, anarchy - anarchism minus Marxism - will be free to get better at being what it is.

... the place where [adults] pass the most time and submit to the closest control is at work. Thus, without even entering into the question of the world economy's ultimate dictation within narrow limits of everybody's productive activity, it's apparent that the source of the greatest direct duress experienced by the ordinary adult is _not_ the state but rather the business that employs him. Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.

To demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical albeit contract-consecrated subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism at its worst.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

[Libertarians] don't denounce what the state does, they just object to who's doing it. This is why the people most victimized by the state display the least interest in libertarianism. Those on the receiving end of coercion don't quibble over their coercers' credentials. If you can't pay or don't want to, you don't much care if your deprivation is called larceny or taxation or restitution or rent. If you like to control your own time, you distinguish employment from enslavement only in degree and duration.

Some people giving orders and others obeying them: this is the essence of servitude. Of course, as Hospers smugly observes, "one can at least change jobs," but you can't avoid having a job - just as under statism one can at least change nationalities but you can't avoid subjection to one nation-state or another. But freedom means more than the right to change masters.

You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.

You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous.

We might get there at 9:30 in the morning for a 1 o'clock game and then leave somewhere between 7 and 8 that night. We like to be right in front of Farley Hall, if we get there early enough.

He was a mechanic, he was a writer, he really worked his way up in racing.

It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes, except that they happen to yield useful end-products.

Wisconsin's big event for sheep producers and fiber enthusiasts is off and growing again, ... The Festival is the fastest growing event of its kind in the Midwest.

We've had a rivalry with them for a long time. We've been gunning for this for years. The girls were ready and they worked real hard all year.

We give them extra-special service whenever they have an accident. We drop what we are doing to get them back on the street as soon as possible.

Normally, when he wants to get someone elected, he calls me.

This can't be good for the boating association.

I know it's our year. We're gonna take the fifth ring.

It has to be considered whether this (looting) was an anomaly or if this is what we could see in another North American city.

The lessons that are going to come out of this thing are significant, but a lot of them are going to be contextual,