Post-left Anarchy – Anarchist Quotes

"You must liberate your ego from all limitedness so entirely that it becomes a human ego."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"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."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"The State always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual to make him subject to some generality or other;"

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"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."

— Fredy Perlman,
anarcho-communist (1934 ‐ 1985)
Anarchist author and activist

"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"

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"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."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"All things are Nothing to Me"

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"We have been expropriated from our own language by television, from our songs by reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornography, from our city by the police and from our friends by wage-labor."

— The Invisible Committee,
Anarcho-Communist
An anarchist collective author

"What do your laws amount to if no one obeys them?"

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"Thirty years of crisis, mass unemployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy. . . . We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis."

— The Invisible Committee,
Anarcho-Communist
An anarchist collective author

"We have to see that the economy is not in crisis, the economy is itself the crisis. It's not that there's not enough work, it's that there is too much of it."

— The Invisible Committee,
Anarcho-Communist
An anarchist collective author

"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."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"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."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"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."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"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."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"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,
Anarcho-Communist
An anarchist collective author

"My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I l myself, and through it am I my property."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"Every time we take a step we're surrounded by the ideological birds of prey who feed on our possibilities, fill themselves with concepts of our desires and reenslave us with beautiful combinations of words which seem to depict the world we failed to realize."

— Fredy Perlman,
anarcho-communist (1934 ‐ 1985)
Anarchist author and activist

"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."

— The Invisible Committee,
Anarcho-Communist
An anarchist collective author

"Do truth, freedom, humanity, justice, desire anything else than that you grow enthusiastic and serve them?"

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"The history of anarchism is a history of unparalleled defeat and martyrdom, yet anarchists venerate their victimized forebears with a morbid devotion which occasions suspicion that the anarchists, like everybody else, think that the only good anarchist is a dead one."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"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!"

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"No one should ever work... In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"Every organization has more in common with every other organization than it does with any of the unorganized."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"Freedom means more than the right to change masters."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"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."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"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."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

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

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"The poor are to blame for there being rich men."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"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."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"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."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"Basically, revolutionaries never go far enough, and if they're not going to go far enough, they should stop upsetting people. Or killing them, for that matter."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"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.""

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"Cleansed of its leftist residues, anarchy - anarchism minus Marxism - will be free to get better at being what it is."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

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

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"A worker is a part-time slave."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"To demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical albeit contract-consecrated subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism at its worst."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"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!""

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"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."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"I am unique. My flesh is not their flesh, my mind is not their mind."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"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."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"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."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"I think my basic viewpoint is that everything the left and right say about each other is true. And the reason it's true is because they have so much in common."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

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

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"No one should ever work. Workers of the world... relax!"

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"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."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"Every state is a despotism."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"In a republic, all are lords, that is, all despotize one over another."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"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.""

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"Most anarchists are, frankly, incapable of living in an autonomous cooperative manner. A lot of them aren't very bright. They tend to peruse their own classics and insider literature to the exclusion of broader knowledge of the world we live in."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

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

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"The "equality of right" is a phantom just because right is nothing more and nothing less than admission, a matter of grace."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"A syndicalist is more likely to be a professor than a proletarian, more likely to be a folk singer than a factory worker. Organizers on principle, syndicalists are disunited and factionalized. Remarkably, this dullest of all anarchisms attracts some of the most irrational and hysterical adherents."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

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

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"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."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"We need anarchists unencumbered by anarchism. Then, and only then, we can begin to get serious about fomenting anarchy."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

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

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"A fist full of might goes farther than a bag full of rights."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"I stubbornly persist in my opposition to the state. But not because, as anarchists so often thoughtlessly declaim, the state is not "necessary". Ordinary people dismiss this anarchist assertion as ludicrous, and so they should. Obviously, in an industrialized class society like ours, the state is necessary."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"He who has might has right... is this wisdom so hard to attain?"

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"Post-leftist anarchists are striking off in many directions. Some may find the way - better yet, the ways - to a free future."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"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."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

"A libertarian is just a Republican who takes drugs."

— Bob Black,
post-left anarchist (1951 ‐ 2020)
American author and anarchist.

"It is not another state that men aim at, but their union, uniting, this ever-fluid uniting of everything standing."

— Max Stirner,
egoist anarchist (1806 ‐ 1856)
Influential philosopher and anarchist

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