Anarchist Quotes – Page 3 – Daily quotes from anarchist philosophers – Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Durruti, Emma Goldman, and more

Government means the right to make the law and to impose it on everyone by force: without a police force there is no government.

The urge for social justice can only develop properly and be effective when it grows out of man's sense of personal freedom and is based on that. In other words Socialism will be free or it will not be at all.

Imagination is very important to having vision and trying to find things that are different, alternate ways.

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 revolution did not fail, it was defeated militarily. Perhaps with the passage of time it would have developed a paralyzing bureaucracy but we will never know.

The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans.

The wise man knows that the oppressed who complain aspire to be oppressors. He relieves them according to his means, but he doesn't believe in salvation through common action.

I can feel free only in the presence of and in relationship with other men.

Freedoms are not given, they are taken.

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.

People get accustomed to the established order of things and tremble at the idea of change. It is this lethargic spirit that needs be replaced by the revolutionary spirit

There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable.

You can win the rat race but you're still a rat.

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

I have a god (dio) like everyone else; but this god is myself (io).

What is property? It is robbery!

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.

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

The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.

Modern anarcho-syndicalism is a direct continuation of those social aspirations which took shape in the bosom of the First International and which were best understood and most strongly held by the libertarian wing of the great workers' alliance.

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

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.

It is obvious that in order to act you need a body of coherent ideas. Contradictions and hesitations prevent ideas getting through.

Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.

My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I l myself, and through it am I my property.

Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.

One should always be a little improbable.

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

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

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.

Authority is something from which we are constantly subtracting, of which there remains always a residue, and which we attempt to make smaller and smaller.

The majority can hardly accept the existence of anything but the two extremes: masters and slaves.

If the federal government had access to every email you've ever written and every phone call you've ever made, it's almost certain that they could find something you've done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don't know it yet.

With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.

The real sense of gradualism remains the same: everything in nature and in life changes by degrees, and this is no less true of anarchy. It can only come about little by little.

The CNT which is the most powerful organisation in Spain must take up its rightful place in the collective order. Its battles must be in tune with its greatness.

The Left (including the Black nationalist movement) really is in a backward stage. Rather than building on the legacy of the 1960's protests, we are instead losing ground and taking reactionary positions.

To be looked upon as a mere part, part of society, the individual cannot bear - because he is more; his uniqueness puts from it this limited conception.

Side neither with nations nor with parties. Be neither Russians, Poles nor Slavs. Rather, be men who hunger for truth, free from any thoughts of particular interests, and from speculative ideas concerning the Chinese, Africans or Europeans. The patriot always ends up hating the foreigner, and loses the sense of justice that once kindled his enthusiasm.

When we have but the will to do it, that very moment will Justice be done: that very instant the tyrants of the Earth shall bite the dust.

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

Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species.

It is through the inspiration of collective responsibility that the revolutionaries of all epochs and all schools have united their forces; it is upon this that they based their hope that their partial revolts - revolts which opened the path for the oppressed - were not in vain, that the exploited would understand their aspirations, would extract from them the applications suitable for the time and would use them to find new paths toward their emancipation.

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.

Liberty is not daughter of order but mother of order.

In an informal organization there is no question of synthesis.

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

The Anarcho-Syndicalists know that wars are only waged in the interest of the ruling classes; they believe, therefore, that any means is justifiable that can prevent the organised murder of peoples.

Anarchism will be seen to be an idealistic philosophy in the sense that it believes freedom will come from the conscious activity of men. No automatic process is to bring it about.

Anarchy is the negation of all authority.

There are some whose nature it is to think and plead, and yield and yet return to the address, and so make headway in the minds of their fellowmen; and there are others who are stern and still, resolute, implacable as Judah's dream of God; - and those men strike - strike once and have ended. But the blow resounds across the world.

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.

Well I sometimes call myself a libertarian but that's only because most people don't know what anarchist means. Most people hear you're an anarchist and they think you're getting ready to throw a bomb at a building.

If cost is made the limit of price, everyone becomes interested in reducing cost, by bringing in all the economies, all the facilities to their aid. But, on the contrary, if cost does not govern the price, but every thing is priced at what it will bring, there are no such cooperating interests.

I am a famous man. My name has been trumpeted to the four corners of the globe. All those people who go through so much trouble to get others to talk about them, yet don't succeed, must be very jealous about the publicity that the press has given my humble self.

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.

Like it or not, the future of life on this planet pivots on the future of society.

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.

One courageous act has sufficed to upset in a few days the entire governmental machinery, to make the colossus tremble.

Class is massively underrepresented in literature. Most books are written for the middle class, and generally they only have two modes of talking about the working class. The first is a kind of lofty contempt at the vulgarity, the stupidity of those people. The second is a kind of patronizing concern, which paints the working class as nothing but victims.

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.

The only revolution is to improve yourself, hoping that others follow. Then the world will improve.

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

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.

Usually, when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

The population of the world is gradually dividing into two classes, anarchists and criminals.

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

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.

The paramount question of the day is not political, is not religious, but is economic. The crying-out demand of today is for a circle of principles that shall forever make it impossible for one man to control another by controlling the means of his existence.

The wise man knows that the words "The happiness of the people," have no meaning. Happiness is internal and individual. It can only be produced within oneself.

There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable.

The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. The only thing that can console one for being rich is economy.

Merciless criticism and independent thinking are two traits of revolutionary thinking. Lovers, lunatics and poets are made of the same stuff

Disorganization is the twin sister of irresponsibility, and together they lead to impoverished ideas and futile practice.

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

The state is the most gigantic criminal extant. It manufactures criminals much faster than it punishes them.

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.

Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy.

As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg.

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

Man as we know him, in the highest actual stage of development, loves learning, yearns alter truth, and identifies his personal happiness with the realization and maintenance of his ideals.

What would have happened if one had really managed to enter the base and destroy it? I don't know. Probably nothing, possibly everything.

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

The means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective property of the race.

Hate does not produce love; we will not renew the world by hate.

Instead of entrusting the defence of your interests to others, see to the matter by yourselves. Instead of trying to choose advisers that will guide you in future actions, do the thing yourselves, and do it now! Men of good will shall not have to look long in vain for the opportunity. To put on others' shoulders the responsibility of one's actions is cowardice.

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

A worker is a part-time slave.

Instead of taking aim at some vague enemy, it's better wait a moment for him to turn into a friend.

There is no principle of anarchy that denies the right of free contract, and have I not a right to contract with others to live with them under the principles of communism?

The aims of anarchists and true communists are identical.

The revolutionary trade unions, in the view of the anarchists, are not only organs of the struggle against the contemporary structure; they are also the cells of the future society.

Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hope on institutions

We must do the impossible -- rid the world of nations, bringing the play of intelligent anarchy into a world environment.

For a long time I have been fascinated by the thought how wonderful it would be if at last, in public opinion on the succession of political and social institutions, the fateful term "one after another" would be replaced through the very simple and self-evident "simultaneously."

Freedom, the realization of freedom: who can deny that this is what today heads the agenda of history?

As a society, western democracies have moved beyond democracy into a new socio-economic formation, the formation/framework of the soft-totalitarian-state.

Unity is the great goal toward which humanity moves irresistibly.

The art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.

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.

Others invent more or less complicated system of mutuality. But in the long run it is always the searching for a more secure guarantee of freedom which is the common factor among anarchists, and which divides them into different schools.

Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.

The main difference between the anarchists and the socialists, including the Marxists, lies in the fact that while the socialists maintain that the state must be taken over as the first step toward its dissolution, the anarchists argue that, since power corrupts, any seizure of the existing structure of authority can only lead to its perpetuation.

America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.

When "voluntary association" is spoken of, voluntary adhesion to a plan, a project, a given action, this implies the possibility of refusing the association, adhesion or action.

We might mention the monumental hypocrisy of the regulation of credit unions in the United States, which require that their membership must share some common bond, like working for the same employer.

The nature of a species can be changed completely as a result of the modifications resulting from the passage through a series of environments.

It is the task of all comrades to think, study and prepare - and to do so with all speed and thoroughly because the times are "dynamic" and we must be ready for what might happen.

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

Communism made through the will of a government instead of through the direct and voluntary work of groups of workers does not really appeal to me. If it was possible, it would be the most suffocating tyranny to which human society has ever been subjected.

Idlers do not make history: they suffer it!

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.

They may kill me, but they cannot kill my ideas. They can crush my body, but they will not be able to crush my spirit

Anarchist communism in Spain differs from collectivism in that it denies all organization for the present and for the future.

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.

The anarchist believes that the government is the limit of liberty. He hopes, by destroying government, to expand liberty. The true limit is not government, but society. Government is a social product like another. We don't destroy a tree by cutting one of its branches.

In the Middle Ages, there was war in some corner of Europe almost every day. But they were little wars with little effects because the powers waging them were little and their resources small.

The leaders of the "official" anarchist movement, still preoccupied with hiding the weaknesses and the inconsistencies, blurring the responsibility, avoiding the fundamental theoretical problems, avoid discussion or are satisfied with a few reluctant confessions and regrets.

Theft is the restitution, the regaining of possession. Instead of being cloistered in a factory, like in a penal colony; instead of begging for what I had a right to, I preferred to rebel and fight my enemy face to face by making war on the rich, by attacking their goods.

The Roman Empire was a state in the real sense of the word. To this day it remains the legist's ideal.

Private property has crushed true individualism, and set up an individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road and encumbering them.

Resignation is death. Revolt is life.

All that which is not liberty is against liberty. Liberty is not a thing that can be allocated.

It’s hard to imagine a surer sign that one is dealing with an irrational economic system than the fact that the prospect of eliminating drudgery is considered to be a problem.

The work of the anarchist is above all a work of critique. The anarchist goes, sowing revolt against that which oppresses, obstructs, opposes itself to the free expansion of the individual being.

If the Russian revolution was a victory, who won? The workers? No. On the other hand, the Commune of Paris was a great working class victory. Ours, too.

In America, the president reigns for four years, and journalism governs for ever and ever.

As you have undertaken to destroy these races, not inferior, but merely latecomer, you tend in like manner to destroy the working class, which you also qualify as inferior.

America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

We must be communists because we are anarchists, because anarchy and communism are the two essential terms of the revolution.

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

Anarchy is synonymous with Socialism. Because both signify the abolition of exploitation and of the domination of man over man, whether maintained by the force of arms or by the monopolization of the means of life.

Anarchism is the usher of science - the master of ceremonies to all forms of truth. It would remove all barriers between the human being and natural development.

Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force.

Is anarchism possible? The failure of attempts to attain freedom does not mean the cause is lost.

Collective responsibility in revolutionary action... is a fundamental principle, which guides each one of us in our way of understanding the anarchist idea, in our determination that it should penetrate to the masses, in its spirit of sacrifice.

No one who knew that the flag consisted of a bit of black stuff on the end of a broomstick would believe it, and no more do you, sir. I wished to show that the laborers were dying of hunger and in need of work. It is the flag of strikes and famines.

And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act, - at least in theory.

No one wants a boss, to be a boss, to work under a boss. The people you like working with are the people you respect as individuals.

I consider it immoral to be a supporter of a power system.

Anarchism is for liberty, and neither for nor against anything else … I define Anarchism as the belief in the greatest amount of liberty compatible with equality of liberty; or, in other words, as the belief in every liberty except the liberty to invade.

A corporate elite of managers and owners governs the economy and the political system.

Society, from which we have everything, is a new master, a new spook, a new "supreme being," which "takes us into its service and allegiance!"

If the existence of bullshit jobs seems to defy the logic of capitalism, one possible reason for their proliferation might be that the existing system isn't capitalism.

Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.

The anarchists, on behalf of the proletariat, therefore consider it necessary to show the proletariat that it will have to win a gigantic battle before it realizes its goals.

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.

I think the question is not about communists and individualists, but rather about anarchists and non-anarchists.

Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate domination.

Rest in peace, poor Mata! Someone who never knew you has sworn to avenge you. And the memory of your blood-drenched eyes will drive his dagger; the vision of your mutilated body will render his bomb more effective.

Because of the over-importance of central leadership, the national organisation was ultimately liquidated entirely, packed up and shipped back to Oakland, California.

To take something from a person and keep it for oneself: that is robbery. To take something from one person and then turn it over to another in exchange for as much money as you can get: that is business.

Eliminating the legal enforcement of DRM -- by criminal, mind, not civil law -- would effectively destroy all business models based on proprietary digital information.

A fist full of might goes farther than a bag full of rights.

An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.

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

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

The anarchists never have claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow authority.

We must ask in a manly and proud posture and not beg on our knees.

The fact that Sacco and Vanzetti were murdered although obviously innocent proves only one thing: that the concept of innocence and guilt is not an objective fact but is a measure imposed by the class struggle.

The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.

Ever since the advent of "Scientific Socialism" every attempt to better the conditions of mankind has been labelled "Utopian" by the followers of Karl Marx.

States are violent to the extent that they have the power to act in the interests of those with domestic power.

I am unique. My flesh is not their flesh, my mind is not their mind.

Organization is, after all, only a means to an end. When it becomes an end in itself, it kills the spirit and the vital initiative of its members and sets up that domination by mediocrity which is the characteristic of all bureaucracies.

We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.

The divine is God's concern; the human, man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine.

The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.

We have to see that the economy is not in crisis, the economy is itself the crisis. It's not that there's not enough work, it's that there is too much of it.

In certain intellectual circles in France, the very basis for discussion - minimal respect for facts and logic - has been virtually abandoned.

Most anarchists are, frankly, incapable of living in an autonomous cooperative manner. A lot of them aren't very bright. They tend to peruse their own classics and insider literature to the exclusion of broader knowledge of the world we live in.

...what does it mean for a Pagan to be apolitical? It can only mean that you will allow mountains be blown apart for coal, forests to be clear-cut, rivers to be poisoned, and the Earth to be overheated until it becomes unlivable.

The love of liberty and the sense of human dignity are the basic elements of the anarchist creed.

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

You must liberate your ego from all limitedness so entirely that it becomes a human ego.

I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly.

The sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning.

People who should be shot: Fascist thugs, religious fundamentalists, people who write lists telling you who should be shot.

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 freedom of everyone, and thereby the freedom of each individual, requires community in socialism.

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.

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

All my political ideas boil down to this formula: political federation or decentralization.

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

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

The anarchist ideal is large and rich in its diversity. Nevertheless, the role of anarchists in the social struggle of the masses is extremely modest. Their task is to help the masses take the right road in the struggle and in the construction of the new society.

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

Our destiny is to reach that state of ideal perfection in which nations will no longer need to be under the tutelage of a government or of another nation; it is the absence of government, it is anarchy, the highest expression of order.

I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject.

Writers: express your rage against all iniquities during all your waking hours.

Anarchists emphatically reject a morality which denies the original concepts of right and wrong.

Capitalism is the same everywhere. In order to survive and prosper it needs a permanent situation of partial scarcity: it needs it to maintain its prices and to create hungry masses to work under any conditions.

High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

Anarchists prepare for social revolution and use every means -- speech, writing, or deed, whichever is more to the point -- to accelerate revolutionary development.

Philosophy will not change the course of events: destiny will fulfill itself regardless of prophecy. Besides, must not justice be done and our education be finished?

I am an anarchist not because I believe anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal.

If it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.

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