Anarchist Quotes – Page 6 – Daily quotes from anarchist philosophers – Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Durruti, Emma Goldman, and more

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.

Anarchists have a 'bad name' in the media, not because they can point to one indiscriminate massacre by anarchists--there have been none--but because the one thing holders of power fear is that they personally should be held responsible for their own actions

The Bolshevik government revealed itself to be powerless in the face of a bureaucracy which is super-abundant, parasitic, despotic and dishonest.

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

We must consciously create our own world, not according to mindless customs and destructive prejudices, but according to the canons of reason, reflection, and discourse that uniquely belong to our own species.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

We need do no more than repeat: only under communism does the individual become himself and lead his own life.

Alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Let us not lose time asking an imaginary god for what only human effort can obtain for us.

Whosoever looks back on the history of socialism after the exclusion of the anarchists can see for themselves the gradual degeneration of Marxism as a political philosophy through the interpretations and practices of the social democrats.

Proudhon was an anti-authoritarian, anti-statist communist, a federalist communist. Was he a communist without knowing it? No, he suspected it, and he said it, at least once.

The world does not belong to us. If it has a master who is stupid enough to want it the way it is, let him have it.

The conflict between wage labor and capital, while it has by no means disappeared, nonetheless lacks the all-embracing importance that it possessed in the past.

The government of man by man (under whatever name it be disguised) is oppression.

We’re not depressed; we’re on strike. For those who refuse to manage themselves, “depression” is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a sidestep towards a political disaffiliation.

Revolution is an inalienable right of mankind. Freedom is an imperishable birth right of all

The future social revolution must take into account the circumstance that the industry and agriculture inherited by it from capitalism would not be uniform in the degrees of development of their various branches.

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

First, then, God, being all-just, wishes to do justice; being all-wise, knows what justice is; being all-powerful, can do justice. Why then injustice?

People, beware of demagogues. They are your worst enemies. They caress you only so they can better shear you.

All social arrangements should admit of this freedom of choice of every individual and all subordination should be voluntary.

What you have the power to be you have the right to be.

Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried.

The anti-sexualism of authoritarian societies and the people who run them does not spring from conviction (they themselves have sex), but from the vague perception that freedom here might lead to a liking for freedom elsewhere.

Before the sacred, people lose all sense of power and all confidence; they occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it. And yet no thing is sacred of itself, but by my declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my conscience.

To my mind a right-wing anarchist is just a minarchist who'd abolish the state to his own satisfaction by calling it something else.

It is the lash of hunger which compels the poor man to submit. In order to live he must sell -- "voluntarily" sell -- himself every day and hour to the "beast of property."

An anarchist is someone who doesn't need a cop to make him behave.

The authoritarian principle has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution.

Never will the anarchists in Spain be made to suffer as they have been and are in Russia.

It is the duty of us poor people to work and struggle to break the chains that make us slaves.

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing.

In France, Portugal, the United States and the South American republics, the trade union organizations were apolitical; how many of them collaborated in the war? France is the only one where such a reproach is warranted.

When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick."

What underpins every social conflict in the United States today is the demand for the realization of all human potentialities in a fully rounded, balanced, totalistic way of life.

The CNT's prisoners will have to thank the politicians for their release, and that to me who am an anarchist, has enormous implications. I would like to walk free thanks to the efforts of my comrades and not due to the philanthropy of someone whom I have to fight tooth and nail as soon as I am out.

The State is said by some to be a "necessary evil"; it must be made unnecessary.

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.

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.

Society will have no need to create special institutions for a social insurance. Since it expects all to work, it will determine the minimum and maximum working ages, before and after which all people will be provided, on an equal footing with others, with the necessities for existence and the comforts of life. Similarly, society will provide for invalids, cripples and the sick.

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercize it, and degrades those over whom it is exercized.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Most anarchists believe the coming change can only come through a revolution, because the possessing class will not allow a peaceful change to take place; still we are willing to work for peace at any price, except at the price of liberty.

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.

The only thing I am not entitled to is what I do not do with a free cheer, that is, that I do not entitle myself to.

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

What if we, as a queer and trans social justice movement, focused on achieving access to many of marriage's forbidden fruits for all people, not just citizen couples, gay, straight, or otherwise?

The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.

There is nothing proletarian -- or revolutionary about immoralist cynicism.

Anarchy is not perfection, it is not the absolute ideal which like the horizon recedes as fast as we approach it; but it is the way open to all progress and all improvements for the benefit of everybody.

I am absolutely convinced that only a small minority, a very small minority, among men, are seriously reached and profoundly moved by our propaganda of criticism, of doubt, of rebellion, of free investigation, of independent research. On the other hand, it is clear that our first interest lies always in seeking to increase this minority; to keep it, under all circumstances alive, active, refreshed. Our own happiness depends on it.

They will die of hunger at the proprietor's door, on the edge of that property which was their birthright; and the proprietor, watching them die, will exclaim, "So perish idlers and vagrants!"

True organisation like true liberty belongs to the future -- and the Socialist Commonwealth, or, as I have termed it elsewhere, the Anarchist Republic.

Only in respecting their human character do I respect my own.

The Communist power installed itself by military force, not only when the Bolsheviks occupied a place after a battle to drive out the Petliurists, but also in places where the region was already free and the peasants were on their own.

For those who stubbornly seek freedom around the world, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination.

Money should be for ponies, not for war, I think.

Is work a social or a natural law? Work is a natural law worsened by society.

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

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

In the United States, the New Left has agreed to regard itself as Marxist and speaks of seizing power and building socialism, although it is strongly opposed to centralized power and it has no economic theory whatever for a society and technology like ours.

The [specifically anarchist] organization is not a union or contractual understanding between individuals bringing their own artificial ideological convictions. It arises and develops as an organic, natural way because it corresponds to a real need.

Anarchists are socialists because they want the improvement of society, and they are communists because they are convinced that such a transformation of society can only result from the establishment of a commonwealth of property.

It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism.

[Warren and Proudhon's idea] originated independently, just as like Leibniz and Newton invented the calculus, or Darwin and Wallace invented the theory of evolution simultaneously, Warren and Proudhon devoted a great deal of energy to the mutual banking idea.

There are even moments when the authority of the socialists and communists is worse than the bourgeois, for they tear down their own ideas and trample on them.

I have a good idea that will exempt you from relying on others while still finding food naturally. How? By practicing communism.

No serious-minded man would venture to predict exactly how the Revolution, the indispensable condition for social renovation, will come about.

In the first place, we are unequivocally opposed to the doctrine of total depravity. We hold that men are depraved only in so far as their surroundings make them so, and if those surroundings were removed, their depravity would disappear.

Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place.

In order to fully realise our aspirations, we must create in the masses of the people the sense of sacrifice and responsibility that has been the characteristic of the anarchist movement throughout its historic development in Spain.

The fight against the destruction of surplus product and against hoarding in Brazil cannot be carried out through the state, but through consumer cooperatives, which affiliated with powerful federations, will be able to deliver to the market and finance production and regulate prices on a fair basis.

Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.

The only generals that we should follow are the generals of the little tin soldiers.

The police represent the authority of the state, the willingness of the state to use violence to assert their will.

The oppression of one is the oppression of all, and we cannot violate the liberty of one being without violating the freedom of all of us.

We are neither for a majority nor for a minority government; neither for democracy not for dictatorship. We are for the abolition of the gendarme. We are for the freedom of all and for free agreement, which will be there for all when no one has the means to force others, and all are involved in the good running of society. We are for anarchy.

Like such titles as Christian and Quaker, "anarchist" was in the end proudly adopted by one of those against whom it had been used in condemnation.

The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war.

We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality.

Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace.

Responsibility must be individual, or there is no responsibility at all.

Moral influence takes its start where humiliation begins; yes, it is nothing else than this humiliation itself, the breaking and bending of the temper down to humility.

Governments never lead; they follow progress. When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then.

The darkling plain is here. This is the waste land: England, America, Russia, China, Israel, France....And we are here as victims, or as spectators, or as perpetrators of tortures, massacres, poisonings, manipulations, despoliation.

Many anarchists, anarcho- and revolutionary-syndicalists, advocates of workers' councils, and other libertarian socialists, have made brilliant analyses of the workers' problems and come up with serious programs, but they continue to talk and dream instead of buckling down to work their ideas out in practice.

History is written by the victors.

When we have undermined the patriotic lie, we shall have cleared the path for the great structure where all shall be united into a universal brotherhood - a truly free society.

If you feel the need to vote in order to avert the immediate threat of fascism, by all means do so... in the meantime, we have a new society to build.

Everybody who has ever worked for a corporation knows that corporations conspire all the time. Politicians conspire all the time, pot-dealers conspire not to get caught by the narcs, the world is full of conspiracies. Conspiracy is natural primate behavior.

Ironically, the world idealized by primitivists would actually preclude the radical individualism celebrated by the individualist heirs of Max Stirner.

We need to return to heroic anarchism, to individual, violent, reckless, poetic, decentering audacity...

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

Any pretense of reducing the role of state in capitalism is a lie. It is impossible to smash the state without, as an immediate consequence, smashing capitalism along with it.

The "government of all the people", if we have to have government, can at best be only the government of the majority.

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

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a "war against terrorism."

Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.

The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.

There are no fair elections in America, certainly when the questions of race and political power are evident.

Freedom must be so extensive that it includes the right not to be free.

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

Given a choice between anarchism and anarchy, most anarchists would go for the anarchism ideology and subculture rather than take a dangerous leap into the unknown, into a world of stateless liberty.

The revolt of the individual against society is not given by that of the masses against governments.

Freedom can only be the whole of freedom; a piece of freedom is not freedom.

It is capitalism and government which stand for disorder and violence. Anarchism is the very reverse of it; it means order without government and peace without violence.

There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible: "for reasons of state."

While we should mobilise to restrain offenders, we must begin to realise that only the community will effectively deal with the matter. Not the racist Capitalist system, with its repressive police, courts and prisons.

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 equal exchange of labor would give as great a reward for honest and useful employments as for useless and fraudulent ones, and individual and unequivocal responsibilities (if for no other reasons) would induce a preference for the honest.

No one today likes truth: utility and self interest have long ago been substituted for truth.

The morality which is born out of the present conception of the state and social hierarchy is necessarily corrupt.

While we have entertained the contention that a deed may make more propaganda than hundreds of speeches, thousands of articles, and tens of thousands of pamphlets, we have held that an arbitrary act of violence will not necessarily have such an effect.

Our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around.

If there is a state, there must be domination of one class by another and, as a result, slavery.

The enemy is very strong because, for centuries past, he has made his living from theft and violence: he has the accumulated experience of that, he has overcome internal crises and now he puts on a new face.

The state behaves as the same ruler that the church was. The latter rests on godliness, the former on morality.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

For the machine, because of the way it is built, can work only in a given direction, no matter who pulls its levers.

What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.

What is "being an active agent?" It is women struggling for liberation with their own might. What is "being a passive agent?" It is men's granting liberation to women... what active forces there have been have come from men, and as a result the benefits to women have not equaled those garnered by men.

Everyone complains about politicians. Everyone says they suck. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky; they don't pass through a membrane from a separate reality. They come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, and American businesses. And they're elected by American voters. This is what our system produces, folks. This is the best we can do.

Now for the remedy. It is in one word, the only word that ever brought equity anywhere - LIBERTY!

Without ecology, society cannot exist, and without humanity and nature, ecology cannot exist.

The period of the actual revolution, the so-called transitory stage, must be the introduction, the prelude to the new social conditions.

Socialism greatly needs Anarchism as a critic and to keep it from sacrificing the individual and his originality to the domination of the mass.

We had never understood the meaning of these words, so common and yet so sacred: Justice, equity, liberty.

When lifestyle anarchists call for autonomy rather than freedom, they thereby forfeit the rich social connotations of freedom.

Do not preach the straight and narrow way while going joyously upon the wide one. Preach the wide one, or do not preach at all; but do not fool yourself by saying you would like to help usher in a free society, but you cannot sacrifice an armchair for it.

The state always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual - to make him subject to some generality or other.

It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.

The complete transformation of everyone's living conditions can never be achieved on the path of slow development, through which at most improvements within a social system are possible.

The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves.

Ever since FDR and Truman crafted the postwar order at the end of WWII, the central goal of U.S. security policy has been to globalize the economy, expand the volume of international trade and maintain institutional arrangements for propping up global corporate rule.

Voting strongly resembles the capitalist economic system that always accompanies democracy.

Not to speak of war and its crimes, from the guilt of which no civilized state is free, can it be denied that chief among the consequences of the existing social system are murder, maladies, and death.

Is anarchism desirable? Well, who does not seek freedom? What man, unless willing to declare himself in bondage, would care to call any control agreeable? Think about it!

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

Nothing wrong with communist anarchism as long as it remains voluntary. Any one that wants to go make a commune, go ahead, do it. I got nothing against it. As long as there's room to the individualist to do his or her own thing.

In anarchy, there are as many "moralities" as there are anarchists, taken individually, or groups or associations of anarchists. Thus, in anarchy, one is amoral.

Direct action is the logical, consistent method of anarchism.

Poverty is the cause of crime, and the laws that stand in the way of free production and exchange are the cause of poverty.

Once the individual owns his own tools and his product, capitalism ceases to exist.

Cybernetics is going to drive the whole world to decentralization which is what the anarchists have always urged. -

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