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

The most that a working-class party could do, even if its politicians remained honest, would be to form a strong faction in the legislatures which might, by combining its vote with one side or another, win certain political or economic palliatives.

As a credo, individualist anarchism remained largely a bohemian lifestyle, most conspicuous in its demands for sexual freedom ("free love") and enamored of innovations in art, behavior, and clothing.

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.

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

The fact that the modern state is the organizational form of an authority founded upon arbitrariness and violence in the social life of toilers is independent of whether it may be "bourgeois" or "proletarian."

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.

Extractivism is as predatory as capitalism, necessitating the repeated destruction of nature and social life.

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.

Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control.

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.

So that is why anarchists keep coming back to the question of what anarchism is. Because anarchism is not a political movement. Or rather it is, but only in a minor aspect.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 republic is nothing whatever but absolute monarchy; for it makes no difference whether the monarch is called prince or people, both being a "majesty."

Only the shallow know themselves.

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

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

Rights aren't rights if someone can take them away. They're privileges. That's all we've ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges.

Freedoms are not given, they are taken.

We have no need to get involved with the games of our oppressors, unless we wish to take part in their oppression.

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

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.

I despise humanity because it is not my humanity. I hate tyrants and I detest slaves.

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

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

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

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

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

The state without slavery is unthinkable - and this is why we are the enemies of the state.

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

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

Power never takes a back step -- only in the face of more power.

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

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

There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.

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.

Protestantism has actually put a man in the position of a country governed by secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, "conscience," watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a "matter of conscience," that is, police business.

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

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

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

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.

No future and no humanity, no communism and no anarchy is worthy of the sacrifice of my life.

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.

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

It is obvious that in calling on anarchists to organise on the basis of a definite program, we are not taking away as such the right of anarchists of other tendencies to organise as they think fit.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Revolutionary liberation must be a self-liberation that reaches social dimensions, not mass liberation or class liberation behind which lurks the rule of an elite, a hierarchy and a state.

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.

Unity is the great goal toward which humanity moves irresistibly.

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.

It is highly advantageous for the business world to foster hatred for pointy-headed government bureaucrats and to drive out of people's minds the subversive idea that the government might become an instrument of popular will, a government of, by and for the people.

That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.

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

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.

A dictatorial committee composed of workers is certainly the thing one could find most inflated with self-importance and nullity and, consequently, the most anti-revolutionary.

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.

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.

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

Idlers do not make history: they suffer it!

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

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.

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.

We must make the world safe for poverty without dependence on government.

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.

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

Man will only be able to act usefully when he will have managed to destroy all lies, freed himself from all the superstitions given birth to by error, sought the truth in the jumble of knowledge and observations.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is not by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself.

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

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.

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.

Capitalism -- a system of power in which ownership and control are divorced from labor -- could not survive in a free market.

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

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

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.

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.

Queer theory seeks to disrupt the normal with the same impulse that anarchists do with relations of hierarchy, exploitation, and oppression.

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.

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.

In an informal organization there is no question of synthesis.

The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; ie, by people relating to one another differently.

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.

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

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.

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

A worker is a part-time slave.

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 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.

Workers, the most absolutely necessary part of the whole social structure, without whose services none can either eat, or clothe, or shelter himself, are just the ones who get the least to eat, to wear, and to be housed withal.

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

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.

That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

If your object is to secure liberty, you must learn to do without authority and compulsion.

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.

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.

One should always be a little improbable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Parliament: A compound word from "parler" (to speak) and "mentir" (to lie).

The present Russian regime and the present order of things can not be called bourgeois -- still less can it be called socialistic or communistic.

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

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

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

That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another's. We see so much only as we possess.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Well, mutual aid is a very critical and important thing. For a while, I was saying libertarians have no souls, but I promised them I wouldn't if they hammered home the importance of mutual aid.

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.

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."

Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate domination.

It is above all over the question of the state that socialists are divided.

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

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

Political freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

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.

It is not a crumb of bread, but the harvest of the entire world that the human race needs, without exploiters and without exploited.

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

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.

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.

Hanged in Chicago, beheaded in Germany, garroted in Jerez, shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Montbrison and in Paris, our dead are many; but you have not been able to destroy anarchy.

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

Be strong. Overflow with emotional and intellectual energy, and you will spread your intelligence, your love, your energy of action broadcast among others! This is what all moral teaching comes to.

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

All laws are wicked, all judgments are unfair, all judges are wrong, all prisoners are innocent.

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.

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

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Whoever calls himself revolutionary and speaks of dictatorship is only an imbecile or a traitor.

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

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

...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.

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

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

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.

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.

There cannot be a history of anarchism in the sense of establishing a permanent state of things called "anarchist." It is always a continual coping with the next situation, and a vigilance to make sure that past freedoms are not lost and do not turn into the opposite.

You anarchist ministers, you make eloquent speeches and you write brilliant articles, but it is not with speeches and articles that one wins the war and defends the revolution.

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.

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

"God" -- as revealed in his book of edicts and narratives is practically an idiot. He has nothing to say that any sensible person should want to listen to.

The right of revolution, which tyrants, in mockery, accord to mankind, is no legal right under a government; it is only a natural right to overturn a governmentent. The government itself never acknowledges this right.

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.

We need anarchists unencumbered by anarchism. Then, and only then, we can begin to get serious about fomenting anarchy.

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

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