"The state behaves as the same ruler that the church was. The latter rests on godliness, the former on morality."
"There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor."
"The "equality of right" is a phantom just because right is nothing more and nothing less than admission, a matter of grace."
"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."
"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."
"Where crime exists, force must exist to repress it. Who denies it? Certainly not liberty; certainly not the anarchists."
"For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between state socialism and anarchism."
"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."
"To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance."
"Anarchists who endeavor to hasten it by joining in the propaganda of state socialism or revolution make a sad mistake indeed."
"All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercize it, and degrades those over whom it is exercized."
"Class is massively underrepresented in literature. Most books are written for the middle class, and generally they only have two modes of talking about the working class. The first is a kind of lofty contempt at the vulgarity, the stupidity of those people. The second is a kind of patronizing concern, which paints the working class as nothing but victims."
"The state always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual - to make him subject to some generality or other."
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
"The state is the most gigantic criminal extant. It manufactures criminals much faster than it punishes them."
"The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss."
"Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value."
"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."
"Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions."
"Patriotism is the vice of nations."
"Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it."
"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."
"The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves."
"The two principles referred to are authority and liberty, and the names of the two schools of socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or the other of them are, respectively, state socialism and anarchism."
"A fist full of might goes farther than a bag full of rights."
"The anarchists never have claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow authority."
"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."
"The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. The only thing that can console one for being rich is economy."
"The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes."
"Liberty enters the field of journalism to speak for herself because she finds no one willing to speak for her."
"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."
"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."
"He who has might has right... is this wisdom so hard to attain?"
"In America, the president reigns for four years, and journalism governs for ever and ever."
"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."
"We need genuine democracy, the definition of which is "the people shall rule.""
"Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercize such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them."
"It is not another state that men aim at, but their union, uniting, this ever-fluid uniting of everything standing."
"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."
