"Direct democracy is a proven practice among peoples of high culture."
"History shows us that the most beneficial works, which were most effective in achieving their beneficial purposes, were precisely those that were directly managed."
"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."
"There are socialists all over the world, by the millions; but where is socialism... political socialism is politics without socialism, and nothing else."
"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."
"The keeping of power is followed by certain benefits that incite the ambition of many who look at it as an end rather than a means, and aspire power to enjoy it."
"In all times, the proletarian was only able to rise above his poverty when -- through his own efforts combined with his brothers' -- he himself created his own wealth."
"You must liberate your ego from all limitedness so entirely that it becomes a human ego."
"The State always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual to make him subject to some generality or other;"
"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."
"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!"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
"I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject."
"What you have the power to be you have the right to be."
"Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice."
"The poor are to blame for there being rich men."
"The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual."
"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."
"The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right."
"Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one."
"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."
"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."
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
"The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free."
"What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self."
"If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law."
"That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have."
"Every state is a despotism."
"Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice?"
"In a republic, all are lords, that is, all despotize one over another."
"Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then?"
"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."
"Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?"
"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."
"That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another's. We see so much only as we possess."
"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."
"If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."
"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."
"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."
"It is not another state that men aim at, but their union, uniting, this ever-fluid uniting of everything standing."
