Anarchist Quotes – Page 5 – Daily quotes from anarchist philosophers – Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Durruti, Emma Goldman, and more

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.

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.

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

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

Ableism and heteronormativity are both oppressive ideologies and cultural constructs that hinder the full potential of realizing the scope of human sexuality and modes of being in the world.

Take the principle that two wrongs don't make a right. If you really took it seriously, that alone would knock away almost the entire basis for war and the criminal justice system.

I stand ready to negotiate, but I want no part of laws: I acknowledge none.

Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.

The liberal government of Spain could have rendered the fascist elements powerless long ago. Instead it compromised and dallied.

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

In Spain, we should have enough intelligence, enough sense of individual and collective responsibility to do for ourselves that which would be imposed upon us by a dictatorship.

Nobody believes or expects that the coming revolution, however formidable it should be, will realize unadulterated anarchist communism.

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.

A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.

The man who would completely isolate himself from his fellow men, would return to the state of a brute animal, if the better armed species had not killed him before.

We must tear down the pyramids, the tumuli, the tombs. We must bring the wheelbarrows into the cemeteries so as to rid humanity of what they call respect for the dead, but which is the cult of carrion.

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

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it.

In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible.

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.

It is the system, rather than individuals, that is the source of pollution and degradation.

The existing system will be quickest and most radically overthrown by the annihilation of its exponents. Therefore, massacres of the enemies of the people must be set in motion.

And as you are invaded and violated, so you subconsciously revenge yourself by invading and violating others over whom you have authority or can exercise compulsion. physical or moral. In this way all life has become a crazy quilt of authority, of domination and submission, of command and obedience, of coercion and subjection, of rulers and ruled, of violence and force in a thousand and one forms.

Once for all, then, we are not opposed to the punishment of thieves and murderers; we are opposed to their manufacture.

Many claim to speak in liberty's name, but few really understand her.

I envy the savages. And I will cry to them in a loud voice: "Save yourselves, civilization is coming."

Those that envision the goal from the first steps, those that want the certitude of reaching it before walking never arrive.

To monotonously live the mouldy hours of the ordinary people, the submissive, the accommodated, a life of convenience, is not living, it is only vegetating and carrying around an amorphous mass of flesh and bones. To life one should give the exquisite elevation of the rebellion of the arms and the mind.

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.

Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes.

Free love? As if love is anything but free! Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.

He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter, but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.

Majorities, as such, afford no guarantees for justice. They are men of the same nature as minorities. They have the same passions for fame, power, and money, as minorities; and are liable and likely to be equally - perhaps more than equally, because more boldly - rapacious, tyrannical and unprincipled, if intrusted with power. There is no more reason, then, why a man should either sustain, or submit to, the rule of the majority, than of a minority.

As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.

Painters: bring back to life, with your talent and your heart, the memory of the great revolts.

Individualist anarchism and communist anarchism are the same, or nearly so, in terms of moral motivations and ultimate goals.

The great majority of people have to work in order to earn a livelihood, and a sizable proportion of them are productive workers. A huge number of workers are unproductive as well. They operate entirely with the circumstances and framework created by the capitalist system, such as shuffling invoices, contracts, credit slips, insurance policies, and so forth. Probably nine out of ten "workers" wouldn't have any work to do in a rational society - one that would not require insurance or any other commercial transactions.

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

The real transformation of society will come only in love, in work, and in stillness.

Whoever has not emancipated himself will be left behind with the current movement and will seek redemption in vain. He will die a slave.

A different conception of society, very different from that which now prevails, is in process of formation.

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

Infinite diversity instead of unity is inevitable, especially in the progressive or transitionary stage.

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

Did the seed of tyranny ever bear good fruit? And can you expect liberty to undo in a moment what oppression has been doing for ages?

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

In existing states a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil.

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.

The subject is not whether we accomplish anarchism today, tomorrow, or within ten centuries, but that we walk towards anarchism today, tomorrow, and always.

Anarchism embraces two worlds: the world of philosophy, of ideas, and the world of practice, of activity. The two are intimately linked.

Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.

Catholics and other Christians are against abortions and they're against homosexuals. Well who has less abortions than homosexuals?

By anarchist spirit I mean that deeply human sentiment, which aims at the good of all, freedom and justice for all, solidarity and love among the people; which is not an exclusive characteristic only of self-declared anarchists, but inspires all people who have a generous heart and an open mind.

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.

He who refuses to submit is at once labelled "queer," "different," and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life.

The demand for equality is nothing other than the demand: equal rights for all!

The act of revolution brings an immediate transformation in the sense that the foundations of society are radically changed, but a progressive transformation in the sense that communism is a constant development.

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

Anarchism is just the way people act when they are free to do as they choose, and when they deal with others who are equally free.

The young whites, and blacks, too, are the only hope that America has, the rest of us have always been living in a lie.

I hate communism because it is the negation of liberty and because for me humanity is unthinkable without liberty. I am not a communist, because communism concentrates and swallows up in itself for the benefit of the state all the forces of society, because it inevitably leads to the concentration of property in the hands of the state.

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.

As regards the mestizo population [of mixed Indian and Spanish heritage], which is the majority of the people of Mexico - with the exception of those who inhabited the great cities and large towns - they held the forests, lands, and bodies of water in common, just as the indigenous peoples did.

The sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood - these fundamentals of the real regeneration of society - the communist state suppressed to the point of extermination.

Cuba has probably been the target of more international terrorism than the rest of the world combined and, therefore, in the American ideological system it is regarded as the source of international terrorism, exactly as Orwell would have predicted.

Since the birth of the state, the world of politics has always been and continues to be the stage for unlimited rascality and brigandage.

Emancipation or non-emancipation of woman, emancipation or non-emancipation of man - what does it mean? Is it that by nature one has rights and the other has no rights?

To analyze ownership, such as it is now constituted, is a chore little more than superfluous. Its justification has yet to be formulated; nobody has ventured to defend it as anything more than something necessary.

The idea that there is a hierarchy of alienation, with sex work ranking as one of the highest, is untrue. This false dichotomy is created by liberal criticisms of capitalism rather than an analysis of anti-capitalism.

There is no need to think in terms of destroying everything in the belief that things will look after themselves.

Wherever there is a man who exercizes authority, there is a man who resists authority.

Actually inventing or producing things is at best the path to small-time wealth. The really big fortunes -- the billionaire kind -- instead come from controlling the circumstances under which other people are allowed to produce things.

Vulgar libertarian apologists... seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they're defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles.

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.

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

I dislike communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.

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.

A different conception of society, very different from that which now prevails, is in process of formation.

Fortunately, no country was ever more suited for anarchist agitation than present-day America.

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 deeper we trace the political influences in history, the more are we convinced that the "will to power" has up to now been one of the strongest motives in the development of human social forms.

Where the state lacks means of coercion, it is important to control what people think.

I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.

Queer is the abnormal, the strange, the dangerous. Queer involves our sexuality and our gender, but so much more. it is our desire and fantasies and more still. Queer is the cohesion of everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world.

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.

The revealed despotic character of state communism, Marxism, caused a reaction in the proletarian movement and brought about world Fascism in politics.

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

We have said and we shall not stop repeating it: no intermediaries, no agents and obedient servants who always end by becoming the real masters!

The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages. As a precaution to ever committing major acts of evil it is our solemn duty never to do what we're told, this is the only way we can be sure.

For Christian anarchists...the goal of anarchy is theonomy — the rule, the ordering, the arky of God.

Yes: all men believe and repeat that equality of conditions is identical with equality of rights; that property and robbery are synonymous terms; that every social advantage accorded, or rather usurped, in the name of superior talent or service, is iniquity and extortion. All men in their hearts, I say, bear witness to these truths; they need only to be made to understand it.

Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.

Liberalism, socialism and state communism are three branches of the same family, resorting to different approaches in order to exercise their power over man.

A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.

For us, it is a matter of crushing fascism once and for all. Yes; and in spite of the government.

All past revolutions were in the end, bourgeois and conservative.

"Whoever denies authority and fights against it is an anarchist," said Sebastien Faure. The definition is tempting in its simplicity, but simplicity is the first thing to guard against in writing a history of anarchism.

A syndicalist is more likely to be a professor than a proletarian, more likely to be a folk singer than a factory worker. Organizers on principle, syndicalists are disunited and factionalized. Remarkably, this dullest of all anarchisms attracts some of the most irrational and hysterical adherents.

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

If the United States was conquered by the Russians, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Elliott Abrams and the rest of them would probably be working for the invaders, sending people off to concentration camps. They're the right personality types.

How many times this must be proven in history before the libertarian believers in violent overthrow of the social order see the light is a deep and serious question. Some people never learn.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy.

Many people know that it is difficult to define socialism, due to the great heterogeneity of schools and systems. But common to all schools is the desire to improve the conditions of all men and to remove all obstacles that prevent this improvement and everything that facilitates the exploitation of man by man.

We are in a society where the power is in the hands of those who are the worst breed of humanity.

I do not expect any help for a libertarian revolution from any government in the world... we expect no help, not even from our own government, in the last analysis.

Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place, some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.

Humanity can not be made equal by declarations on paper. Unless the material conditions for equality exist, it is worse than mockery to pronounce men equal.

A government that shall punish all vices impartially is so obviously an impossibility, that nobody was ever found, or ever will be found, foolish enough to propose it.

The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever.

The wise man notes that reforms change the names of things and not the things themselves. The slave became a serf, and then a salaried worker: nothing has been reformed but language. The wise man remains indifferent to these questions of philology.

What one needs to do at every moment of one's life is to put an end to the old world and to begin a new world.

The state, the society, the institutions, the body politic, the nation, the system, or customs we live in, must not be permitted to become primary, but must be secondary!

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.

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime? Is not the court of a tribunal a school of ferocity?

The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market.

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.

No one should ever work. Workers of the world... relax!

People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.

It is society that makes criminals and you, jury members, instead of striking you should use your intelligence and your strength to transform society. In one fell swoop you'll suppress all crime. And your work, in attacking causes, will be greater and more fruitful than your justice, which belittles itself in punishing its effects.

It is a sad sight to see those who believe themselves to be revolutionaries unleashing their hatred on the anarchist.

May the enemies of the people be terrified at the unexpected awakening.

Anarchic socialism and the revolutionary spirit still survive in Spain; they will do their work and the solidarity of the other nations will not fail us.

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

There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.

We have come more and more under the dominance of mechanics and sacrificed living humanity to the dead rhythm of the machine without most of us even being conscious of the monstrosity of the procedure.

We're supposed to worship Adam Smith but you're not supposed to read him. That's too dangerous. He's a dangerous radical.

The situation is like this: they hired our parents to destroy this world, and now they'd like to put us to work rebuilding it, and -- to add insult to injury -- at a profit.

I think it can be clearly proven that the mental constitution of woman, like that of man, has never failed to rise where restrictions upon equal freedom have been torn down.

Wars are, probably, the greatest of all destroyers of property, and they originate chiefly in two roots. First, for direct or indirect plunder; secondly, for the privileges of governing.

The whole economic system of capitalism is an offshoot of a devouring and overwhelming lust, of a kind that can hold sway only in a society that has deliberately renounced the Christian asceticism and turned away from heaven to give itself over exclusively to earthly gratifications.

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.

Nor does [our kind of individualist] wish to have anything in common with those armchair Nietzcheans or weekend Stirnerites who imagine, poor wretches, that they are "affirming their individuality" by petty dishonesty in money matters, or by forcing themselves upon the companion of a friend in prison.

Intellectuals: put yourself at the service of the weak. Meditate upon this; this is the really urgent work.

I would rather, much rather, be illegitimate according to the statutes of men, than illegitimate according to the unchanging law of nature.

There is no such thing as harmless power.

The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.

Trades organization is still only in the embryonic stages. Once rid of politicians' tyranny, it can stride out freely and, like the child learning to take his first steps, toddle along the road of independence.

I had been told that society's institutions were founded on justice and equality, and all around me I could see nothing but lies and treachery.

Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up.

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production, and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.

Obviously, the revolution will produce many misfortunes, many sufferings; but if it produced one hundred times more of them, it would still be a blessing relative to what one endures today.

In short, progress is out of communism toward individualism, out of a condition of status to one of contract, out from authority toward liberty. But the "herd instinct" still remains.

As a social anarchist, I believe that capitalism itself is an inherently exploitative hierarchical situation - you do have a boss, you do have somebody in charge.

Without the rule of one, there would be light, there would be truth, there would be justice. The rule of one is a crime.

He who negates present society, and seeks social conditions based on the sharing of property, is a revolutionary whether he calls himself an anarchist or a communist.

In the pettiest struggle, born of the needs of the moment, there must be mirrored the great goal of social liberation, and each such struggle must help to smooth the way and strengthen the spirit which transforms the inner longing of its bearers into will and deed.

Plebeian and bourgeois are equivalent. They deserve each other.

Proletarians of the world, look into the depths of your own beings, seek out the truth and realise it yourselves: you will find it nowhere else.

Impossibility never prevented anything from happening.

The anarchist conclusion is that every kind of human activity should begin from what from what is local and immediate, should link in a network with no centre and no directing agency, hiving off new cells as the original grows.

Anarchism does not depend on theory or programs, which try to grasp man's life in its entirety. It is a teaching, which is based on real life, which outgrows all artificial limitations, which cannot be constricted by any system.

For two decades the supporters of Bolshevism have been hammering it into the masses that dictatorship is a vital necessity for the defense of the so-called proletarian interests against the assaults of counter-revolution and for paving the way for socialism.

Experience proves to the wise man that revolutions never have lasting results. Reason tells him that lies are not refuted by lies, and that violence isn't destroyed by violence.

The reaction always begins where one tries to bring life to a certain norm. That is why yesterday's revolutionaries so often become today's reactionaries.

Thirty years of crisis, mass unemployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy. . . . We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis.

Spirit, like flame, like freedom, like creativeness, is opposed to any social stagnation or any lifeless tradition.

You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious.

Things tend to organise themselves. If there is any message from contemporary science, it is surely that.

The habit of direct action is, perhaps, identical with the habit of being free, prepared to live responsibly in a free society.

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.

The individualist anarchist is never accountable to anyone but himself for his acts and gestures.

If the state would only remove those laws that stand in the way of free land, free money, and transportation, its other statutes would, in course of time, become useless and "repeal" themselves.

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

The Bolshevik practice of the last ten years shows clearly the counter-revolutionary role of their dictatorship of the Party.

The poor are to blame for there being rich men.

If there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind.

The point of public relations slogans like "Support Our Troops" is that they don't mean anything.

What do your laws amount to if no one obeys them?

I think the role of the revolutionary movement is still in workplace organising, but I also think, in community organisation.

If there be in nature such a principle as justice, it is necessarily the only political principle there ever was, or ever will be.

The anarchist is the one who refuses every cause for the joy of his life radiating from inner spiritual intensity.

Power makes you drunk, and the best, when invested with authority, become the worst.

It has come to pass in history that the workers have defeated capitalism, but the victory then slipped from their grasp, because some state power emerged, amalgamating the interests of private capitalism and those of state capitalism for the sake of success over the toilers.

If you say that you reject violence when it exceeds the limits imposed by the needs of defense, they accuse you of pacifism, without understanding that violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism, just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism.

What consoles me is that there are combatants that remain, because despite all the persecution, the anarchist idea has germinated and the theoretical revolution is ending, being quickly replaced by the practice of action.

Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth!

We are apolitical and take no part in party quarrels. In all spheres we are for the voluntary against the obligatory; for consent against imposition; for reason against violence; for free examination against dogmatism.

Admittedly, I do have several bones - whole war fields full of bones, in fact - to pick with organised religion of whatever stripe.

Are there any altruists who would go to hell in order that their neighbors should go to heaven? There is no hope of reward in hell, and a true altruist must expect no reward for his acts.

It is important not to confuse federalism as it is understood by the Paris Commune with the so-called federalism which exists in Switzerland and in the United States of America.

Man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.

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

The proprietor, producing neither by his own labor nor by his implement, and receiving products in exchange for nothing, is either a parasite or a thief.

Organised religion has corrupted one of the purest, most powerful and sustaining things in the human condition. It has imposed a middle management, not only in our politics and in our finances, but in our spirituality as well.

Post-leftist anarchists are striking off in many directions. Some may find the way - better yet, the ways - to a free future.

I believe in the human soul regnant over all laws which man has made or will make; I believe there is no peace now, and there will never be peace, so long as one rules over another; I believe in the total disintegration and dissolution of the principle and practice of authority; I am an anarchist, and if for this you condemn me, I stand ready to receive your condemnation.

I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.

There is, therefore, no solution possible other than an economy directed by the workers through their organizations of control -- through the workers' syndicates.

Go ahead, vote! Have faith in your delegates, believe in those you have voted for. But if you voted, don't complain.

Consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation states are built on deficit spending. Debt has come to be the central issue of international politics. But nobody seems to know exactly what it is, or how to think about it.

Our authority is our own conscience. She is the one that pushes us, she is our spur. We are slaves, but to our duty.

No, there is no need to fear life without government; we long for it with all of our hearts.

Whether individually or as a countless mass, man finds himself at the mercy of this band of drones going under the name of "governors and masters," when in reality they are nothing but straightforward exploiters and oppressors.

Non-Profit Anarchist Clothing Coop ★ Free Worldwide Shipping On ALL Orders!