Love Quote by Benjamin Tucker

Tucker’s line is a scalpel aimed at a familiar moral pose: the demand that you love everyone, all the time, on command. He treats that demand less as spiritual generosity than as a category error - a way of laundering coercion through the language of virtue. If love is indiscriminate, it stops being a response to a person and becomes a rule, the emotional equivalent of a law posted on a wall. And once an emotion is legislated, it’s no longer an emotion; it’s compliance.

The rhetorical move is shrewd. Tucker doesn’t argue that universal love is difficult; he argues it’s conceptually impossible. “Obliteration of distinction” is doing heavy lifting: love, in his view, has meaning because it distinguishes. It picks out, values, prefers, commits. Strip away selection and judgment and you’re left with something like neutrality - or worse, a forced friendliness that can coexist with real harm. That’s why he pairs love with hate. When you’re told to “love” the oppressor and the oppressed indiscriminately, the command doesn’t elevate love; it cheapens moral perception. It asks you to treat incompatible actions as equally deserving of intimacy.

Context matters: Tucker, an American individualist anarchist, distrusted institutions that claim authority over the inner life - church, state, any moral regime that turns personal ethics into social control. The subtext is anti-authoritarian to the core: if power can order your feelings, it can order everything. His point isn’t to license cruelty; it’s to defend the moral importance of discernment, and to insist that real solidarity starts with choosing, not obeying.