"he who is a pensioner of the state is a slave of the state.....The state had entered to solve [unemployment] by dole and work relief, by setting up so many bureaus that we were swamped with initials.... Labor was aiding in the creation of the Welfare State, the Servile State, instead of aiming for the ownership of the means of production and acceptance of the responsibility that it entailed."
-Peter Maurin

"The child does not belong to the state; it belongs to the parents. The child was given by God to the parents; he was not given by God to the state."
-Peter Maurin

"we are headed in this country towards a totalitarianism every bit as dangerous towards freedom as the other more forthright forms. We have our secret police, our thought control agencies, our overpowering bureaucracy.... The American State, like every other State, is governed by
those who have a compulsion to power, to centralization, to the preservation of their gains. And it is the liberals--The New Leader, New Republic, Commonweal variety--who have delivered the opiate necessary for the acceptance of this tyranny among "progressive" people. It is the fallacy of attempting social reform through the State, which builds up the power of the State to where it controls all avenues of life"
-Catholic Worker editor Robert Ludlow in 1951