Anarchist Quotes – Daily quotes from anarchist philosophers – Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Durruti, Emma Goldman, and more

The power of the state will never deliver joy, happiness and fulfillment to any society. Such power was created by drones for the sole purpose of pillage and indulgence of their often murderous violence against those who do produce, through their toil - whether through determination, intelligence or brawn - everything useful and good in man's life.

If the federal government can't even count how many laws there are, what chance does an individual have of being certain that they are not acting in violation of one of them?

Now, in a situation where the working class has practically disintegrated, the possibility of an expropriation of the means of production no longer exists.

It is not another state that men aim at, but their union, uniting, this ever-fluid uniting of everything standing.

All that's left to be done is that the workers take possession of the factory, the workshop, the mine, the foundry, the railroad, the ship, in a word, everything - that they recognize no bosses of any type.

Even if a single United Nations World State would come into existence, it would solve nothing. It would still be composed of the reduced number of state organisms crystallizing around the remaining great powers.

Basically, revolutionaries never go far enough, and if they're not going to go far enough, they should stop upsetting people. Or killing them, for that matter.

I am not appreciated in this society. I have the right to live, and while your imbecilic criminal society tries to stop me, well too bad for it, too bad for you!

The anarchist teaching prescribes no method of struggle and rejects none which is in harmony with self-determination and free will.

Aggression is simply another name for government.

Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it.

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

Anarchy's roots go deep: its spouts from the bosom of a rotten society that is falling apart; it is a violent backlash against the established order; it stands for the aspirations to equality and liberty which have entered the lists against the current authoritarianism.

I think my basic viewpoint is that everything the left and right say about each other is true. And the reason it's true is because they have so much in common.

The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism.

Being an anarchist does not mean one has reached a certainty or said once and for all, "There, from now on I hold the truth and as such, at least from the point of view of the idea, I am a privileged person." Anyone who thinks like this is an anarchist in word alone.

I believe in individual freedom; that's my primary and complete commitment - individual liberty. That's what it's all about. And that's what socialism was supposed to be about, or anarchism was supposed to be about, and tragically has been betrayed.

Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea!

I do not want to unite with the multitude of those who flatter the proletariat, excusing them, praising them, adorning them with wreathes.

What I want is the revolution, which will cause poverty to disappear. I hail the revolution, which is inevitable, and I hope that it will come soon to bring liberty and equality to the suffering.

As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.

Unfortunately, there are still a number of people who continue in the fatal belief that government rests on natural laws, that it maintains social order and harmony, that it diminishes crime, and that it prevents the lazy man from fleecing his fellows.

Thinking men and women the world over are beginning to realize that patriotism is too narrow and limited a conception to meet the necessities of our time.

The police are making more anarchists than I could do in ten years.

The outcome of this vote will, at best, slow down the rate at which the American government gravitates towards plutocracy, police statism and global corporate Empire.

Drawn at first to socialism, I was not slow in separating myself from that party. I have too much love of freedom, too much respect for individual initiative, too much repugnance for military organization, to assume a number in the ordered army of the fourth estate.

No, it is not life that is bad, but the conditions in which we live. Therefore we shall address ourselves not to life, but to these conditions: let us change them.

The emancipation of woman is nothing else than the emancipation of humanity - both sexes.

Capitalism and communism felt like they were always going to be around, but it turns out they were just two ways of ordering an industrial society. If you were looking for more fundamental human political poles, you'd take anarchy and fascism, for my money.

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

The life that society offers us is not a full, free and joyful life. It is a crushed, mutilated, humiliated life. We must refuse it.

Out of the class or property social system there cannot emerge a "representation" which signifies an honest attempt to secure just exposition of principles and expressions of antagonistic interests.

In a republic, there are at least brief periods when the people, while continually exploited, is not oppressed; in the monarchies, oppression is constant.

We can only desire based on what we know. It is our present experience of what we are and are not able to do that largely determines our sense for what is possible.

Just as you cannot see, at pleasure, with your ears and you cannot, at will, hear with your eyes so too you cannot make the state act in the interests of the working people. As an organ in the social body, its purpose is for the repression of self-determination.

Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled utopian.

As moderate as they were, as sensible as they proved themselves to be, the founders of the Circle turned out to be too advanced in the judgment of the guardians of moral order.

Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice?

Durruti had learned endless things during the months of civil war, but the main lesson that he received was a full confirmation of the working class's capacity to govern itself and the damage done by the committees' bureaucratic leaderism.

Let us not lose time asking others to give us what we can obtain ourselves.

Sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.

A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, (or by any other name indicating his true character,) or by millions, calling themselves a government.

Anarchism means all sort of things to different people, but the traditional anarchists' movements assumed that there'd be a highly organized society, just one organized from below with direct participation and so on.

Who knows if it will be possible for the U.S. anarchist scene to coexist with, let alone work with a newly emerging Black anti-authoritarian movement? One thing that white anarchists must understand it that is not merely a question of getting Blacks and other non-whites to join Anarchist associations, just to say they have a Black face. We must work to build a non-racist society and we must have principled unity.

The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.

Comrades, let us hurry on the revolution as quickly as we can, since, as you see, our enemies are letting us die like this - in prison or in exile, or crazed with sorrow.

Freedom means more than the right to change masters.