"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."
"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."
"Fascism may be briefly described as the reluctant acquiescence of capitalists to governmental regimentation in order to stem the increasing impotency of a one-sided wealth accumulation to satisfy the needs of a country."
"The anarchist believes that the government is the limit of liberty. He hopes, by destroying government, to expand liberty. The true limit is not government, but society. Government is a social product like another. We don't destroy a tree by cutting one of its branches."
"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."
"Anarchism will be seen to be an idealistic philosophy in the sense that it believes freedom will come from the conscious activity of men. No automatic process is to bring it about."
"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."
"It is Marx's tortured truisms that give a plausibility to his works in their totality."
"Between these two classes, and with the growth of manufacture and commerce, there arose an intermediate class whose affluence depended on personal ingenuity and ability, in whose attitude entered little of either the master or slave psychology but who clearly saw that their well-being depended on the freedom to exercise their abilities."
"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."
"Ever since the advent of "Scientific Socialism" every attempt to better the conditions of mankind has been labelled "Utopian" by the followers of Karl Marx."
"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."
"Is work a social or a natural law? Work is a natural law worsened by society."
"The wise man knows that the oppressed who complain aspire to be oppressors. He relieves them according to his means, but he doesn't believe in salvation through common action."
"You must liberate your ego from all limitedness so entirely that it becomes a human ego."
"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. The Invisible Committee Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self."
"The State always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual to make him subject to some generality or other;"
"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"
"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."
"All things are Nothing to Me"
"What do your laws amount to if no one obeys them?"
"Might is a fine thing, and useful for many purposes; for one goes further with a handful of might than with a bagful of right."
"Never does a State aim to bring in the free activity of individuals, but always that which is bound to the purpose of the State."
"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."
"Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self."
"My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I l myself, and through it am I my property."
"Do truth, freedom, humanity, justice, desire anything else than that you grow enthusiastic and serve them?"
"Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea!"
"Liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break through all limits, or, more expressively: not to every one is that a limit which is a limit for the rest... he who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means."
"God and mankind have concerned themselves for nothing, for nothing but themselves. Let me then likewise concern myself for myself, who am equally with God the nothing of all others, who am my all, who am the only one."
"What you have the power to be you have the right to be."
"The poor are to blame for there being rich men."
"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."
"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."
"That the communist sees in you the man, the brother, is only the Sunday side of communism... If you were a "lazy-bones," he would not indeed fail to recognize the man in you, but would endeavour to cleanse him as a "lazy man" from laziness and to convert you to the faith that labor is man's "destiny and calling.""
"The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime."
"Freedom can only be the whole of freedom; a piece of freedom is not freedom."
"Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap."
"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!""
"I am unique. My flesh is not their flesh, my mind is not their mind."
"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."
"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."
"What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self."
"Every state is a despotism."
"In a republic, all are lords, that is, all despotize one over another."
"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.""
"The state behaves as the same ruler that the church was. The latter rests on godliness, the former on morality."
"The "equality of right" is a phantom just because right is nothing more and nothing less than admission, a matter of grace."
"The state always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual - to make him subject to some generality or other."
"The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss."
"Protestantism has actually put a man in the position of a country governed by secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, "conscience," watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a "matter of conscience," that is, police business."
"The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves."
"A fist full of might goes farther than a bag full of rights."
"He who has might has right... is this wisdom so hard to attain?"
"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."
"It is not another state that men aim at, but their union, uniting, this ever-fluid uniting of everything standing."