Anarchist Quotes
Anarchist Quotes

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Authors List


Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman, Anarchism's Influential Voice

Emma Goldman was born on June 27, 1869, in the Russian Empire and immigrated to the United States at a young age where she became an influential anarchist and feminist. She passionately advocated for a variety of controversial ideas including anarchism, free speech, feminism, and birth control, causing her to face frequent imprisonment and legal scrutiny. Goldman's fiery speeches and written works significantly influenced both contemporaries and future generations of anarchists.

Goldman's political ideas were considered radical even within the anarchist movement. She published her ideas widely, most notably in her own magazine, Mother Earth. Her contributions to anarchism revolved around her belief in the individual and her opposition to the state and all forms of control. Her belief in the possibility of social change through revolution made her inspirational to other activists. Her writings, speeches and life actions greatly contributed to developing anarchist movements across the world.


Date of Birth: June 27, 1869

Date of Death: May 14, 1940

Country of Birth: Russian Empire

Political Ideas: Anarchism, Free Speech, Feminism

Quotes Available: 47



Quotes by Emma Goldman

Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.
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.
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village; stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.
People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.
No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.
Give us what belongs to us in peace, and if you don't give it to us in peace, we will take it by force.
If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.
Anarchism: The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.
Direct action is the logical, consistent method of anarchism.
Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.
Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society.
Revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims.
Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.
The right to vote, or equal civil rights, may be good demands, but true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts. It begins in woman's soul.
The people are asleep; they remain indifferent. They forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters to crucify their Christs.
It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that revolution is in vain unless inspired by its ultimate ideal.
After all, it means thirteen dollars per month, three meals a day, and a place to sleep. Yet even necessity is not sufficiently strong a factor to bring into the army an element of character and manhood.
I do not believe in God, because I believe in man.
Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.
The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.
The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.
The period of the actual revolution, the so-called transitory stage, must be the introduction, the prelude to the new social conditions.
This perversion of the ethical values soon crystallized into the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party: THE END JUSTIFIES ALL MEANS.
The inherent tendency of the state is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities.
The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.
There is no hope even that woman, with her right to vote, will ever purify politics.
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.
There are some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are ignorance, superstition, and bigotry - the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth.
What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!
Crime is naught but misdirected energy.
The most violent element in society is ignorance.
The sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood - these fundamentals of the real regeneration of society - the communist state suppressed to the point of extermination.
He who refuses to submit is at once labelled "queer," "different," and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life.
When we have undermined the patriotic lie, we shall have cleared the path for the great structure where all shall be united into a universal brotherhood - a truly free society.
Our cause cannot expect me to become a nun and the movement will not be turned into a cloister.
If revolution results only in a change of dictatorship, then it is hardly worth while.
Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony.
The authoritarian principle has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution.
Today is the parent of tomorrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future.
True, we have no conscription; that is, men are not usually forced to enlist in the army, but we have developed a far more exacting and rigid force - necessity.
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.
Revolution is indeed a violent process.
In its mad passion for power, the communist state even sought to strengthen and deepen the very ideas and conceptions which the Revolution had come to destroy.
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.
The police are making more anarchists than I could do in ten years.
It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance" that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.
The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism.


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