"Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread."
"Unfortunately, there are still a number of people who continue in the fatal belief that government rests on natural laws, that it maintains social order and harmony, that it diminishes crime, and that it prevents the lazy man from fleecing his fellows."
"War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village; stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other."
"People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take."
"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."
"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."
"If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution."
"Anarchism: The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary."
"I would rather, much rather, be illegitimate according to the statutes of men, than illegitimate according to the unchanging law of nature."
"Direct action is the logical, consistent method of anarchism."
"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.""
"Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most."
"Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society."
"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."
"Revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims."
"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."
"Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think."
"The right to vote, or equal civil rights, may be good demands, but true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts. It begins in woman's soul."
"Today, go blossom in the shadow of the dark and sad prisons. Go, bloom near the somber captive, and tell them truly that we love them. Tell them that through fleeting time, everything belongs to the future, that the livid conqueror can die more surely than the conquered."
"The people are asleep; they remain indifferent. They forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters to crucify their Christs."
"Every person who ever thought he had a right to assert, and went boldly and asserted it, himself, or jointly with others that shared his convictions, was a direct actionist."
"It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that revolution is in vain unless inspired by its ultimate ideal."
"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."
"After all, it means thirteen dollars per month, three meals a day, and a place to sleep. Yet even necessity is not sufficiently strong a factor to bring into the army an element of character and manhood."
"Socialism and communism both demand a degree of joint effort and administration which would beget more regulation than is wholly consistent with ideal anarchism."
"Power is cursed, that is why I am an anarchist."
"I do not believe in God, because I believe in man."
"Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism."
"The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society."
"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."
"The period of the actual revolution, the so-called transitory stage, must be the introduction, the prelude to the new social conditions."
"In the name of Purity what lies are told! What queer morality it has engendered. For fear of it you dare not tell your own children the truth about their birth; the most sacred of all functions, the creation of a human being, is a subject for the most miserable falsehood."
"This perversion of the ethical values soon crystallized into the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party: THE END JUSTIFIES ALL MEANS."
"Government is as unreal, as intangible, as unapproachable as God."
"The inherent tendency of the state is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities."
"The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime."
"Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations."
"It is not a crumb of bread, but the harvest of the entire world that the human race needs, without exploiters and without exploited."
"There is no hope even that woman, with her right to vote, will ever purify politics."
"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."
"There is one common struggle against those who have appropriated the earth, the money, and the machines."
"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?"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Thinking men and women the world over are beginning to realize that patriotism is too narrow and limited a conception to meet the necessities of our time."
"There are some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are ignorance, superstition, and bigotry - the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth."
"What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!"
"Now for the remedy. It is in one word, the only word that ever brought equity anywhere - LIBERTY!"
"The spirit which animates Emma Goldman is the only one which will emancipate the slave from his slavery, the tyrant from his tyranny - the spirit which is willing to dare and suffer."
"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."
"Crime is naught but misdirected energy."
"What I want is the revolution, which will cause poverty to disappear. I hail the revolution, which is inevitable, and I hope that it will come soon to bring liberty and equality to the suffering."
"Every anarchist, as an anarchist, would be perfectly willing to surrender his own scheme directly, if he saw that another worked better."
"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."
"I think it can be shown that the law makes ten criminals where it restrains one."
"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."
"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?"
"Each seeks his way, we seek ours and think the day that freedom and equality reign, mankind will be happy."
"The most violent element in society is ignorance."
"I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly."
"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."
"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."
"He who refuses to submit is at once labelled "queer," "different," and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life."
"Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never."
"The task of teachers, those obscure soldiers of civilization, is to give to the people the intellectual means to revolt."
"Our cause cannot expect me to become a nun and the movement will not be turned into a cloister."
"Without the rule of one, there would be light, there would be truth, there would be justice. The rule of one is a crime."
"If revolution results only in a change of dictatorship, then it is hardly worth while."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony."
"The authoritarian principle has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution."
"True, we have no conscription; that is, men are not usually forced to enlist in the army, but we have developed a far more exacting and rigid force - necessity."
"Today is the parent of tomorrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future."
"Free love? As if love is anything but free! Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere."
"Revolution is indeed a violent process."
"The revolution will be the flowering of humanity as love is the flowering of the heart."
"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."
"A man won't steal, ordinarily, unless that which he steals is something he cannot as easily get without stealing; in liberty the cost of stealing would involve greater difficulties than producing, and consequently he would not be apt to steal."
"Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled utopian."
"I repeat that I am a political prisoner. The prosecution, whatever the attorney general may say, is political and nothing else."
"Anarchism seeks to arouse the consciousness of oppression, the desire for a better society, and a sense of the necessity for unceasing warfare against capitalism and the State."
"Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a little slug of lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance."
"We love to have agents provocateurs in the party, because they always propose the most revolutionary motions."
"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."
"The police are making more anarchists than I could do in ten years."
"It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance" that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe."
"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."
"Miss Goldman is a communist; I am an individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property, I wish to assert it."
"The social order of Spain ought to be overthrown; must be overthrown, will be overthrown; and Ferrer was doing a mighty work in that direction. The men who killed him knew and understood it well."
"The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism."
