Anarchist Quotes – Page 2 – Daily quotes from anarchist philosophers – Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Durruti, Emma Goldman, and more

Liberty is not daughter of order but mother of order.

Marxist schools have authors. Just as Marxism sprang from the mind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists, Trotksyites, Gramscians, Althusserians... Now consider the different schools of anarchism. There are Anarcho-Syndicalists, Anarcho-Communists, Insurrectionists, Cooperativists, Individualists, Platformists... None are named after some great thinker; instead, they are invariably named either after some kind of practice, or most often, organizational principle.

If on the one side we do not harbor the illusion that the entire proletariat must be enlightened before it can be called into battle, so on the other we do not doubt that as much enlightenment as possible must be produced with oral and printed agitation.

"Soviet" power is a power no better and no worse than any other.

We cannot pretend that we do not see the policeman who walks in front of the windows with a loaded revolver, defending us, while we eat our savory dinner or view a new performance, or those soldiers who will immediately go with their guns and loaded cartridges to where our property will be violated.

The Ottoman Empire was an ugly affair, but they had the right idea. The rulers in Turkey were fortunately so corrupt that they left people alone pretty much - were mostly interested in robbing them - and they left them alone to run their own affairs, and their own regions and their own communities with a lot of local self determination.

We can use queer theory to conceptualize new relationship forms and social relations that resist patriarchy and other oppressions by creating a distinctly queer-anarchist form of social relation.

All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate every one's part in the production of the world's wealth.

You who are resigned, look: I spit on your idols. I spit on God, the Fatherland, I spit on Christ, I spit on the flag, I spit on capital and the golden calf; I spit on laws and Codes, on the symbols of religion; they are baubles, I could not care less about them, I laugh at them...

The anarchist ideals are far from being in contradiction, as the "scientific socialists" claim, to the laws of evolution as proved by science; they are a conception which fits these laws perfectly; they are the experimental system brought from the field of research to that of social realization.

Anarchists are committed to treating other people as equals, rather than as either masters or subordinates.

Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

Private capitalism, condemned by history, only survives today thanks to the arms race on the one hand, and the comparative failure of state communism on the other.

Those who produce everything have nothing, and those who produce nothing have everything. Such a state of affairs can only produce antagonism between the laboring class and the owning, i.e., do-nothing, class. The fight breaks out and hatred delivers its blows.

If today we fall without compromising, we can be sure of victory tomorrow.

Anarchy is the negation of all authority.

The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.

Do not quarrel or deal in personalities. Listen to opposing arguments after you have presented your own. Learn how to remain silent and reflect. Do not try to get the better in an argument at the expense of your own sincerity.

The people are asleep; they remain indifferent. They forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters to crucify their Christs.

But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.

Idlers do not make history: they suffer it!

Pagan anarchists don't make rules for other people. No one is saying that a Pagan is not allowed to be a supporter of capitalism. You're always allowed to do whatever you choose-but that doesn't mean it makes sense.

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

Government intervention in the market is the main source of large fortunes.

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.

Never ever separate thought from action, the things we know, the things we understand, from the things we do, the things with which we carry out our actions.

I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow.

Good people don't much like those who tread a different path.

You should reject every authority, but also commit yourself to a deep respect for all sincere convictions. Live your own life, but also allow others the complete freedom to live theirs.

The conditions of contemporary life encircle the workers on all sides, surround them, like water surrounds fish in the sea. The workers are not able to escape from these conditions.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Man, according to the diverse conditions in which he moves, is more or less worthy or unworthy. The more he has a sense of his liberty, the more he also has a feeling of his dignity; the more respect he has for himself, and also for his fellows.

Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations.

In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.

The aims of anarchists and true communists are identical.

During humankind's long centuries societies have risen and fallen, all alike in this one fact which rules all history: the great are protected, the small are crushed.

Equality! I had always thought that it was the natural fruit of Liberty, which has no need of theory nor of constraint.

We tried many times before to speed on the social revolution in Spain; attempted to stir up the feelings of the people and to raise the banner of Libertarian Communism.

Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, submission, and panic.

We won the revolution, what we lost was the war.

In a republic, all are lords, that is, all despotize one over another.

Revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims.

If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them.

Do I want to propose my own system? Not at all! I am an advocate of all systems.

Wheresoever it be, there will exist the power of certain men over others, and there will not be freedom, but there will be the oppression of one portion of mankind by another. Therefore power must be abolished.

What matters most is that people, all men, lose their sheepish instincts and habits that the millennial slavery inspired them, and they learn to think and act freely.

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

I stubbornly persist in my opposition to the state. But not because, as anarchists so often thoughtlessly declaim, the state is not "necessary". Ordinary people dismiss this anarchist assertion as ludicrous, and so they should. Obviously, in an industrialized class society like ours, the state is necessary.

Maybe I am crazy. But my madness is the most terrible rationality. I see further, I feel life more vividly.

All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate every one's part in the production of the world's wealth.

Without doubt, conventional right, contract and law, even universally and directly exercised, is not natural right, or justice. It is a compromise between anarchy and authority, and everything that is not completely just is injustice.

We are not ready to fight because we love fighting. We are ready to fight because we are worth fighting for.

The realization of the usefulness of cooperation, which should have led to the triumph of solidarity in all human relations, instead gave rise to private property and government, that is to the exploitation of the labor of the whole community by a privileged minority.

The view which sees in every capitalist only a profit machine may very well meet the demands of propaganda, but it is conceived much too narrowly and does not correspond to reality.

To truly know freedom, one must develop the human being until one makes sure that no authority has the possibility of existing.

If there is going to be real class unity or solidarity, there is no way forward for white anarchists, socialists, or autonomous people of color except to recognize the necessity of organizing movements based on new conceptions of class and race.

Anarchism seeks to arouse the consciousness of oppression, the desire for a better society, and a sense of the necessity for unceasing warfare against capitalism and the State.

Dictatorship, whether it is a hydra with a hundred heads or a hundred tails, whether they are autocratic or demagogic, can certainly do nothing for liberty: it can only perpetuate slavery, morally and physically.

Was traditional anarchism, idealistic and prone to splits, not destined to fail as soon as it found itself confronted by an implacable social struggle, for which it was not in the least way prepared?

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then?

Never does a State aim to bring in the free activity of individuals, but always that which is bound to the purpose of the State.

Anarchism is based on an essentially optimistic conception of human nature: if individuals have a natural tendency to get on well together then there is no need for the existence of a state to arbitrate between them.

Liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break through all limits, or, more expressively: not to every one is that a limit which is a limit for the rest... he who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means.

For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between state socialism and anarchism.

The struggle is so great that the triumph over fascism alone is worth the sacrifice of our lives.

Bakunin was unquestionably inferior to Marx as a political economist. His economics are Marxist, and he subscribed enthusiastically to Marx's theory of surplus value and dissection of the capitalist system.

Terrorism is tempting with its tremendous possibilities. It offers a mechanical solution, as it were, in hopeless situations.

Libertarians make a dogma of liberty; anarchists make it an end.

Those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest.

We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregard them altogether, saying with regret they were impossible of realization. Now indeed they seem to be able to be brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonising problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realization?

Even if you believe that voting is more than a selection of meaningless choices designed to mask the true lack of agency we have, there is a tremendous amount of money and power and influence on the other side of this equation. So don't just vote or petition.

Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all.

I am not myself free or human until or unless I recognize the freedom and humanity of all my fellowmen.

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value.

What is the most important thing in the world? It is eating. Why do you women suffer mistreatment? It is relying on others in order to eat.

Although a firm friend of order, I am (in the full force of the term) an anarchist.

If you consider these worthy electors as unable to look after their own interests themselves, how is it that they know how to choose for themselves the shepherds who must guide them? And how will they be able to solve this problem of social alchemy, of producing the election of a genius from the votes of a mass of fools?

No government in the world fights fascism to the death. When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to fascism to maintain itself.

We were founded on a very basic double standard: This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free.

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

In order to destroy an effect you must first destroy the cause. If there is theft it is only because there is abundance on one hand and famine on the other; because everything only belongs to some. The struggle will only disappear when men will put their joys and suffering in common, their labors and their riches, when all will belong to everyone.

The hundreds of workers' associations organized during the period 1870-1900 and the tens of publications give ample testimony to the energetic anarchist activity designed to destroy bourgeois, state and religious influences among workers.

Right-libertarians aren't noted for siding with workers against employers, and right-to-work isn't an exception to the rule.

We cannot help but believe that were every law, every title deed, every court, and every police officer or soldier abolished tomorrow with one sweep, we would be better off than now.

The aim is not therefore to liberate some 'essential self' by throwing off the burden of government and the State, but to develop the self in creative and voluntary relations with others.

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

Freedom, we want nothing more than freedom, since what freedom does not do, not one institution whatsoever will be able to make possible.

To us it means nothing that there is a Soviet Union somewhere in the world, for the sake of whose peace and tranquility the workers of Germany and China were sacrificed to Fascist barbarians by Stalin.

It is Marx's tortured truisms that give a plausibility to his works in their totality.

The task of the conscious minority is to profit from every situation to change the environment in a way that will make possible the education of the whole people.

I repeat that I am a political prisoner. The prosecution, whatever the attorney general may say, is political and nothing else.

If power is to be abolished it must be abolished not by force but by men's consciousness of its uselessness and evil.

What do I, a proletarian, care for the tranquility and security of the rich? I care as little for public order as for the proprietor's safety. I ask to live a laborer; otherwise I will die a warrior.

The problem with the Confederates wasn't too little loyalty to the Union. It was too much loyalty -- to the Confederate states and the slave power they represented.

Fascism may be briefly described as the reluctant acquiescence of capitalists to governmental regimentation in order to stem the increasing impotency of a one-sided wealth accumulation to satisfy the needs of a country.

If in order to win it were necessary to erect the gallows in the public square, then I would prefer to lose.

The second element of freedom is negative. It is the revolt of the individual against all divine, collective, and individual authority.

In that pitiless war which we have declared on the bourgeoisie, we ask for no pity. We give death, and we know how to endure it.

The Cold War serves as a useful device for the managers of American society and their counterparts in the Soviet Union to control their own populations and their own respective imperial systems.

Monopoly and privilege must be destroyed, opportunity afforded, and competition encouraged. This is liberty's work, and "Down with Authority" her war-cry.

It is often said that anarchists live in a world of dreams to come, and do not see the things which happen today. We do see them only too well, and in their true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forest of prejudice that besets us.

The spirit which animates Emma Goldman is the only one which will emancipate the slave from his slavery, the tyrant from his tyranny - the spirit which is willing to dare and suffer.

The individual is quite a world of federations, a whole universe in himself.

The people themselves, and only the people, determine the rhythm of our fight.

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

The category of the "worker," defined in the strict Marxian economic sense, and politically constituted through the revolutionary vanguard whose goal was the dictatorship of the proletariat, no longer seems viable.

In Russia the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat has not led to Socialism, but to the domination of a new bureaucracy over the proletariat and the whole people.

Those who would like to see society transformed without shocks must make up their minds to surrender the hope; it is impossible. Ideas in the course of evolving lead to revolution.

At the basis of Proudhon's economic theory we find two essential ideas, that of value and that of exchange. These two ideas are only of interest in the regime of individual property.

Even in infancy, while a person is dependent on another, abuses are committed and slavery and tyranny exist. It should be the purpose of free schools to study the reasons for such a lack of solidarity, to draw the attention of the pupils to what they actually see.

The most violent element in society is ignorance.

The protesting students are anarchist because they are in a historical situation to which anarchism is their only possible response.

The United States was born in a revolution, and some of its most revered Founding Fathers extolled the right to make one.

It is very difficult for the Marxist-Leninists to make an objective criticism of anarchism as such, because by its nature it undermines all the suppositions basic to Marxism.

In the name of Purity what lies are told! What queer morality it has engendered. For fear of it you dare not tell your own children the truth about their birth; the most sacred of all functions, the creation of a human being, is a subject for the most miserable falsehood.

We have been expropriated from our own language by television, from our songs by reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornography, from our city by the police and from our friends by wage-labor.

When you create Hope in people, you create expectations. When you do not fulfill those expectations, when the change becomes more of the same old, same old, the Hope that was created can only turn to anger, frustration and bitter disappointment.

At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts.

Patriotism: a willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

The revolution will be the flowering of humanity as love is the flowering of the heart.

Today, go blossom in the shadow of the dark and sad prisons. Go, bloom near the somber captive, and tell them truly that we love them. Tell them that through fleeting time, everything belongs to the future, that the livid conqueror can die more surely than the conquered.

Only the shallow know themselves.

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

To go towards freedom, it becomes necessary to develop our individuality.

We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves.

The urge to destory is a creative urge.

We are certain that communities of joy will emerge from our struggle here and now. And for the first time life will triumph over death.

Conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting... the truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.

The god of the Christians, as we have seen, is the god who makes promises only to break them; who sends them pestilence and disease in order to heal them; a god who demoralizes mankind in order to improve it.

"Malcolm X advocates armed Negroes!" What was wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong. I was a black man talking about physical defense against the white man. The white man can lynch and burn and bomb and beat Negroes -- that's all right: "Have patience" ... "The customs are entrenched" ... "Things will get better."

We love to have agents provocateurs in the party, because they always propose the most revolutionary motions.

Let us light the fuse on the dynamite of vengeance!

If all our comrades of Europe, America and other countries, who do not understand what we are doing to Spanish anarchism, would come to Spain, we could then see how they would react.

But though egoism or altruism, separately, each pushed to its extreme, is pernicious to the individual and society, united they are resolved into a third term, which is the law of future societies. This law is solidarity.

We do not fetishize organization, but in order to elaborate and defend this struggle, organization is a necessity.

Police are bureaucrats with weapons.

The individualist is like a wolf who prefers the dangers of liberty to the routine of domestication. Individualists compare themselves to the bird who would prefer to suffer and struggle on its branch than to die a slow death in the servitude of a gilded cage.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes.

A structure based on centuries of history cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of explosives.

An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.

They make revolutionary propaganda because they know the privileged class can never be overturned peacefully.

The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.

The domination of man by the creation of man is even more ridiculous than the domination of man by man.

Somebody once declared that the only two political theories that are completely consistent are anarchy and totalitarianism. Anarchy fully embraces the concept of self, totalitarianism fully rejects that concept.

Those maintaining positions of power will always encourage the freedom to talk about ideas, but never to act.

The state is nothing but this domination and this exploitation, well regulated and systematised.

You complain, but you want to maintain the system where you vegetate. Occasionally you rebel, but it's only ever just to start doing the same thing again from scratch.

Ah well, this is the crime that I am here for: for not recognizing the right of these people to die of plenty while the producers, the creators of all social wealth, starve.

Instead of inanely repeating the old formula, "Respect the law," we say, "Despise law and all its attributes!"

Not all those who are considered anarchists are pure anarchists. Tolstoy and Kropotkin have to be thrown out, having very little anarchy in their systems. They are anarchists only in the political sphere, and in all other relations between people they remain ardent communists.

At the base of contemporary capitalist society lies the principle of private property, owing to which society is divided into two fundamental classes -- the capitalists and the proletariat.

Then hang us! Here we will tread upon a spark, but there, and there, and behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up.

An anarchist is a man who is careful to always use pedestrian crossings, because he utterly detests talking with policemen.

The true and legitimate meaning of the word treason, then, necessarily implies treachery, deceit, breach of faith. Without these, there can be no treason.

Governments involve the citizen in national and state responsibilities from which he would choose to be exempt; under these circumstances he can feel no security for person or property.

Each seeks his way, we seek ours and think the day that freedom and equality reign, mankind will be happy.

Unless we realize that the present market society, structured around the brutally competitive imperative of "grow or die," is a thoroughly impersonal, self-operating mechanism, we will falsely tend to blame other phenomena - such as technology or population growth - for growing environmental dislocations.

Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is the exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak.

To weaken authority and criticize its acts is not enough. A negation, in order to be absolute, needs to complete itself with an affirmation. That is why I affirm liberty, why I deduce its consequences.

All of the exploited, legal or illegal, cooperate in the state of domination.

I passionately love humanity, and have dedicated my best efforts to the fight for the oppressed. All tyrants disgust me -- and all those who put up with them, adulate them, support them. After having brought them down will I make myself a tyrant in their place? I would be disgusted with myself.

It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep.

Resignation is death. Revolt is life.

Abundant cheap credit would drastically alter the balance of power between capital and labor, and returns on labor would replace returns on capital as the dominant form of economic activity.

The legitimate, the equitable compensation for the loan of money, is the cost of labor in lending it and receiving it back again.

That patriotism which tends toward unity without regard to liberty is an evil patriotism.

Socialists, so called, have degraded Marx's declaration of a political class struggle to mean something which it never did and never can mean, namely, parliamentary action.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

No one should ever work... In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

Our cause cannot expect me to become a nun and the movement will not be turned into a cloister.

Oppressed brother, banish all power from within you and do not allow any to be established either over you or over your brother, be he near or far!

All the results of the mistakes of governments are quite admirable.

This brings us to anarchism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the state should be abolished.

We can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.

This flagrant negation of humanity which constitutes the very essence of the state is, from the standpoint of the state, its supreme duty and its greatest virtue.

The peoples of the world are becoming profoundly dissatisfied and are not appeased by the promise of the social democrats to patch up the state into a new engine of oppression.

If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

The State always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual to make him subject to some generality or other;

In Germany, Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Belgium, England, the trade union organizations were political; they tailored their policies to be in accord with the socialist parties; can you deny that they collaborated in the war?

The old motives of profit and self-interest will cease to dominate economic life. Instead the incentive will be the good of the members of society, without distinction.

In other words, what Clinton wants is the opposite of free trade. She wants to keep the wealth of Africa in hands of the heirs and assigns of the same people who stole it, under colonialism.

Anarchy will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power and by there being more and more people who will be ashamed of applying this power.

Every anarchist, as an anarchist, would be perfectly willing to surrender his own scheme directly, if he saw that another worked better.

While governments are subjected to the principle of free experimentation, to free competition, they will improve and perfect themselves on their own. No more aloofness, up in the clouds, which only hides their emptiness. Success for them will entirely depend upon them doing it better and cheaper than the others do.

There is one common struggle against those who have appropriated the earth, the money, and the machines.

Like any system of social relations, straightness is both something that is out there, in the larger world we call society or the system as well as something that is inside—in our heads our hearts our minds

In anarchy the Russian, Finn, Jew, Georgian, and Ukrainian are not enemies, but comrades. In short, there is only one conclusion: anarchy inevitably leads to internationalism.

In vices, the very essence of crime - that is, the design to injure the person or property of another - is wanting.

The peoples' revolution will arrange its revolutionary organization from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty.

There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money.

The Makhnovist movement was founded on the deep feeling of fraternity which characterizes only the most oppressed. During its entire history it did not for an instant appeal to national sentiments.

Might is a fine thing, and useful for many purposes; for one goes further with a handful of might than with a bagful of right.

Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.

When [the synthesis anarchist organization] develops itself fully (as happened in Spain in '36) it begins to dangerously resemble a party. Synthesis becomes control.

Generally speaking, individualists are mere philosophers rather than revolutionary activists.

Masters aren't necessary, these people whose idleness is maintained by our labor; everyone must make himself useful to society, by which I mean work according to his ability and his aptitude.

I -- anarchist and individualist -- don't want to and cannot embrace the cause of atheist communism, because I don't believe in the supreme elevation of the masses and therefore I refuse the realization of Anarchy understood as a social form of human life together.

Fate and freedom alike play a part in history; and there are times, as in wars and revolutions, when fate is the stronger of the two.

Anarchy -- the sovereignty of the individual over his own actions -- is the goal for which we strive. Communism is one of those incidents that come afterwards.

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