Anarchist Quotes – Page 4 – Daily quotes from anarchist philosophers – Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Durruti, Emma Goldman, and more

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.

...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.

Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression.

There is a conflict between the static and dynamic conceptions of anarchism, between those who want to gregarize and stabilize anarchism and those who want the revolutionary, individualist spirit to remain and simmer permanently within anarchism.

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.

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

Where crime exists, force must exist to repress it. Who denies it? Certainly not liberty; certainly not the anarchists.

It is from the love of humanity that we are revolutionaries: it is not our fault if history has forced on us this distressing necessity.

Always and everywhere among us, practical problems have been resolved by a majority of votes.

I actually think that law enforcement should be difficult, and I think it should actually be possible to break the law.

In this country, where we have no continuing anarchist tradition, the young hardly know their tendency at all.

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.

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

There are socialists all over the world, by the millions; but where is socialism... political socialism is politics without socialism, and nothing else.

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.

Property is impossible.

It's called the American Dream, 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it.

The sovereign, self-sufficient "individual" has always been a precarious basis upon which to anchor a left libertarian outlook.

Hate does not produce love, and by hate one cannot remake the world.

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

It is not the product of their labors to which the workers have a right. It is the satisfaction of their needs, whatever the nature of those needs.

The task of teachers, those obscure soldiers of civilization, is to give to the people the intellectual means to revolt.

What is a utopia? A dream unrealized, but not unrealizable.

Freedoms are not given, they are taken.

To my mind, the struggle for liberty is too great and the few steps we have gained have been won at too great a sacrifice, for the great mass of the people of this 20th century to consent to turn over to any political party the management of our social and industrial affairs.

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

The critical human flaw is not that as a species we're particularly aggressive. It's that we tend to respond to aggression very poorly.

I don't vote, because I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain.

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."

Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercize such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.

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

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.

It is especially in the domain of ethics that the dominating importance of the mutual aid principle appears in full.

We should not put forward revolutionary action as a means of social reform, because that pretended means would simply be an appeal to force, to arbitrariness, in brief, a contradiction.

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.

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

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.

I do not believe in God, because I believe in man.

Anarchism... teaches the possibility of a society in which the needs of life may be fully supplied for all, and in which the opportunities for complete development of mind and body shall be the heritage of all.

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.

Today is the parent of tomorrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future.

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

A person is strong only when he stands upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts from his deepest convictions.

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.

Naturally, any conqueror is going to play one group against another.

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

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

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.

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

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

Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

Bodies and the bullets are real. Painfully real. The concrete does not self-organize into the Wall. No border, invented by humans minds, asserts its own existence. No gun shoots itself. There is human action behind every border, every wall.

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.

Do something right for once: throw off the straitjacket of legislation; wash yourself off, and clean your body, the social body, of all the parasites and vermin that are devouring you. And then - only then - will you be able to fully come to life.

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

He who has might has right... is this wisdom so hard to attain?

The one thing that the public dislike is novelty.

Network executives, talk show hosts, and newspaper publishers and editors travel in the same social circle as the powerful state and corporate figures whom they're theoretically supposed to serve as watchdogs over.

Patriotism is the vice of nations.

Non-violent resistance activities cannot succeed against an enemy that is able freely to use violence.

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

One who is constantly striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a machine himself and loses all human feeling.

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

Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

In the face of dogmas, of despots, of the sentimental, of charlatans and regimenters, humanity's future belongs to reason.

As surprising as it might seem, there's a strong parallel between this free market vision of abundance and the Marxist vision of full communism.

Nine-tenths of the activities of modern government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.

Revolution is indeed a violent process.

We are the slaves of slaves. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men.

Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.

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

The coming Revolution could render no greater service to humanity than by making the wage system, in all its forms, an impossibility, and by rendering Communism, which is the negation of wage-slavery, the only possible solution.

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.

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.

The peoples owe all the political rights and privileges which we enjoy today in greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength.

We must fight authority and privilege, while taking advantage from the benefits that civilization has conferred. We must not destroy anything that satisfies human need however badly - until we have something better to put in its place.

You have accused me of theft, as if a worker that has nothing could be a thief.

The struggles of doctrinal exclusivism languish at present. My desire is to have contributed to making them disappear entirely.

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

One can lose one's illusions about everything and about everyone, but not about what one affirms with one's moral conscience.

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

What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.

The collapse of communist systems nearly two decades ago led to a profound disillusionment in the west, not only with the communist project -- which had been in a state of crisis for some time -- but with radical left-wing politics generally.

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.

While we do preach perfect communism, it is not in the certainty or expectation of communism's being the social form of the future: it is in order to further men's education, and round it off as completely as possible, so that, by the time that the day of conflagration comes, they will have attained maximum emancipation.

If this is the price to be paid for an idea, then let us pay. There is no need of being troubled about it, afraid, or ashamed. This is the time to boldly say, "Yes, I believe in the displacement of this system of injustice by a just one; I believe in the end of starvation, exposure, and the crimes caused by them."

Whoever says "proletarian State" says "State Capitalism" whoever says "dictatorship of the Proletariat" says "Dictatorship of the Communist Party;" whoever says "strong government" says "Tsarist oligarchy of politicians."

It makes a lot of sense, if you accept capitalist system, to try to accumulate property, not just because you want material welfare, but because that guarantees your freedom.

Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state.

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.

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

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

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."

True intellectual culture and the demand for higher interests in life does not become possible until man has achieved a certain material standard of living, which makes him capable of these.

I wish to say that we anarchists have never changed our position. We are anarchists as of old and still pursue the same ideals.

The human animal is an animated alimentary canal. He has evolved from and differs from the worm only by the appendages which have developed on him.

Anarchists no more want to be masters than they want to be servants - they no more want to exercise violence than to submit to it. They expose, they propose, but they do not impose.

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

As set forth by theologians, the idea of "God" is an argument that assumes its own conclusions, and proves nothing.

Why, liberty of the press is only permission of the press, and the state never will or can voluntarily permit me to grind it to nothingness by the press.

To condone ferocious anti-human feelings and raise them to the level of principle as a tactic for a movement... is both evil and counter-revolutionary.

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 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.

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

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.

Leninism constitutes, without any doubt, a return to the revolutionary spirit of Marxism, but it also constitutes a return to the fallacies and abstractions of Marxist metaphysics.

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

Education is a slow process, and may not come too quickly.

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.

The state idea means something quite different from the idea of government.

Basically, if you're not a utopianist, you're a schmuck.

If you consider yourself a centrist, you're being played.

People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

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

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.

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

Above all, what socialist, without flushing with shame, maintains he is not a revolutionary? We say: none!

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.

We don't have faith; we have absolutely no confidence in our success.

There has not been one revolution in the world's history which was carried out by the working people in their own interests - by urban workers and poor peasants who do not exploit the work of others.

If this is the road we must take, we cannot do it sustained and fettered by some phoney unproductive sentimentalism without also setting obstacles in the path of what we seek to advance as the goal of energetic rebellion.

The anarchists reject the path of parliamentary activity. Their tactics are based on the principle of direct action: mass protests, strikes, boycott, sabotage and other methods of direct influence.

As early as World War I, American historians offered themselves to President Woodrow Wilson to carry out a task they called "historical engineering," by which they meant designing the facts of history so that they would serve state police.

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

Governmental communism, like theocratic communism, is repugnant to the worker.

The anarchist individualists do not present themselves as proletarians, absorbed only in the search for material amelioration, tied to a class determined to transform the world and to substitute a new society for the actual one.

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

Identifying as a Pagan, feminist, Witch, and anarchist is possibly a way to alarm great segments of the general public, but at least it keeps me from sinking into a boring and respectable middle age.

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.

Do truth, freedom, humanity, justice, desire anything else than that you grow enthusiastic and serve them?

The point social ecology emphasizes is not that moral and spiritual persuasion and renewal are meaningless or unnecessary; they are necessary and can be educational. But modern capitalism is structurally amoral and hence impervious to moral appeals.

Louis Blanc has gone so far as to reverse the republic motto, as if he wanted to revolutionize the revolution. He no longer says, as everybody else says, and according to tradition, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; he says Equality, Fraternity, Liberty!

Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never.

If we hope and even assume that the social question will be answered through communism, and not in this or that country but in the world, any thought of centralization must be a monstrosity.

In place of the cowardly phrase, "Obey the law," our cry is "Revolt against all laws!"

I offered to stay awake to let the others go to sleep, and everyone laughed, saying that I would not even hear the cannon! But afterwards, one by one, they fell asleep, and I am watchful over all of them, while working for those who are to come.

The word anarchist seems to me too restrictive and I don't use it unless it is joined by the word communist.

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

Libertarian communism is as yet only an approximation, and not a dogma of absolute truth.

Fascism becomes less and less possible. We have to accept that we are moving towards some sort of anarchy.

Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.

Anarchism, to me, means not only the denial of authority, not only a new economy, but a revision of the principles of morality. It means the development of the individual as well as the assertion of the individual. It means self-responsibility, and not leader worship.

Anarchism is a part of human nature, communism its logical extension.

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.

Stability means we run it. There are countries that are very stable. Cuba is stable, but that's not called stability.

Ask a method? Do you ask Spring her method? Which is more necessary, the sunshine or the rain? They are contradictory - yes; they destroy each other - yes, but from this destruction the flowers result.

The revolution consisted in the fact that the workers became masters of the instruments of labor and did not falter in their management of the means of production.

Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.

Anarchists who endeavor to hasten it by joining in the propaganda of state socialism or revolution make a sad mistake indeed.

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

Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.

It is possible I can make very little of myself; but this little is everything, and better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the State.

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 law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror.

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.

I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion.

A worker is a part-time slave.

Libertarian revolutionists should not continue to remain in isolation, when here is an opportunity to build a mass instrument for social struggle and a way to unify our libertarian forces on firm working class lines.

It's one thing to say, "Another world is possible." It's another to experience it, however momentarily.

Freedoms are not given, they are taken.

As soon as one identifies, challenges and overcomes illegitimate power, he or she is an anarchist. Most people are anarchists.

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

Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience.

These revolutionaries, bare-necked politickers, have preserved with the imprint of the collar, the moral stain of servitude, the stiff neck of despotism.

The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.

For us, everything that seeks to destroy economic and political oppression, all that which serves to raise the moral and intellectual level of human beings, to give them the consciousness of their rights and of their forces and to persuade them to do their business by themselves, all that provokes hatred against oppression and love between people, brings us closer to our aim.

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

Give us what belongs to us in peace, and if you don't give it to us in peace, we will take it by force.

What economists call over-production is but a production that is above the purchasing power of the worker, who is reduced to poverty by capital and state.

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

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

Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

What we mean by equality between the sexes is not just that men will no longer oppress women. We also want men to no longer be oppressed by other men and women no longer to be oppressed by other women.

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

In our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.

Nobody scolded or hated capitalism more than him, but the subtle mind of Proudhon saw the vileness of communism.

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

Bigness, or oversize, is really much more than just a social problem. It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation.

Common to all Anarchists is the desire to free society of all political and social coercive institutions which stand in the way of development of a free humanity.

By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible.

Now one thing white radicals must give up is the idea that the whole struggle hinges around white workers on their own deciding en masse to reject capitalism and racism.

As far as the problem of the state goes, the lesson of the Russian revolution is written on the wall for all to see.

Justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men... if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence.

But we must create in each person a sense of responsibility in order that each one of us can have the right to enjoy all his rights.

Miss Goldman is a communist; I am an individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property, I wish to assert it.

No one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live; no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential unless you invite them to.

I think my brief period in the Panthers was very important because it taught me about the limits of -- and even the bankruptcy of -- leadership in a revolutionary movement.

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

We have confirmed something we only knew in theory, namely that revolution, in which uncontrolled and uncontrollable forces operate imperiously, is blind and destructive, grandiose and cruel.

The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.

The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

Thus, on the one hand, the "unionised" are today in a position to understand, study and receive libertarian teachings: on the other, anarchists need not fear that, in taking part in the corporative movement, they will be required to forswear their independence.

The fact that modern wars are fewer in number can hardly be considered a praiseworthy contribution to peace if we take into account the misery they spread from one end of the world to the other.

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!"

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.

I regretted Mathillet's death because he was a prole like us, a slave of bourgeois society. It was his gesture that was fatal.

The word "state" is identical with the word "war."

When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist.

I believe that anarchism and communism are feasible on an international scale only, and I do not believe in them in one country alone.

The Puritans had accused the Quakers of "troubling the world by preaching peace to it." They refused to pay church taxes; they refused to bear arms; they refused to swear allegiance to any government.

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