Anarchist Quotes – Page 3 – Daily quotes from anarchist philosophers – Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Durruti, Emma Goldman, and more

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.

Money has no essence. It's not really anything; therefore, its nature has always been and presumably always will be a matter of political contention.

Liberalism, socialism and state communism are three branches of the same family, resorting to different approaches in order to exercise their power over man.

I believe that anarchism and communism are feasible on an international scale only, and I do not believe in them in one country alone.

The Mexican people hate, by instinct, authority and the bourgeoisie.

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.

It is only fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always apologize to one in private for what they have written against one in public.

"Malcolm X advocates armed Negroes!" What was wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong. I was a black man talking about physical defense against the white man. The white man can lynch and burn and bomb and beat Negroes -- that's all right: "Have patience" ... "The customs are entrenched" ... "Things will get better."

It is Marx's tortured truisms that give a plausibility to his works in their totality.

The philosophy of anarchism is included in the word "Liberty"; yet it is comprehensive enough to include all things else that are conducive to progress.

Anarchy, today, is attack; it is war against every authority, every power, every state. In the future society, anarchy will be defence, the prevention of the re-establishment of any authority, any power, any state.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

I don't vote, because I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain.

I think the question is not about communists and individualists, but rather about anarchists and non-anarchists.

Let us light the fuse on the dynamite of vengeance!

Liberty enters the field of journalism to speak for herself because she finds no one willing to speak for her.

Education is a slow process, and may not come too quickly.

High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

Revolutionary liberation must be a self-liberation that reaches social dimensions, not mass liberation or class liberation behind which lurks the rule of an elite, a hierarchy and a state.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

It is above all over the question of the state that socialists are divided.

That patriotism which tends toward unity without regard to liberty is an evil patriotism.

Socialists, so called, have degraded Marx's declaration of a political class struggle to mean something which it never did and never can mean, namely, parliamentary action.

Poets and musicians: launch your vibrant stanzas that awaken in the soul of the humble a sense of impatience with their servitude and, during those all-too-frequent moments of discouragement, refresh the ardor of the strong.

There is no need to think in terms of destroying everything in the belief that things will look after themselves.

Painters: bring back to life, with your talent and your heart, the memory of the great revolts.

The idea that there is a hierarchy of alienation, with sex work ranking as one of the highest, is untrue. This false dichotomy is created by liberal criticisms of capitalism rather than an analysis of anti-capitalism.

I have a god (dio) like everyone else; but this god is myself (io).

I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it.

The struggle is so great that the triumph over fascism alone is worth the sacrifice of our lives.

Anarchists prepare for social revolution and use every means -- speech, writing, or deed, whichever is more to the point -- to accelerate revolutionary development.

When [the synthesis anarchist organization] develops itself fully (as happened in Spain in '36) it begins to dangerously resemble a party. Synthesis becomes control.

If the United States was conquered by the Russians, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Elliott Abrams and the rest of them would probably be working for the invaders, sending people off to concentration camps. They're the right personality types.

Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

Oppressed brother, banish all power from within you and do not allow any to be established either over you or over your brother, be he near or far!

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.

As surprising as it might seem, there's a strong parallel between this free market vision of abundance and the Marxist vision of full communism.

It is highly advantageous for the business world to foster hatred for pointy-headed government bureaucrats and to drive out of people's minds the subversive idea that the government might become an instrument of popular will, a government of, by and for the people.

For two decades the supporters of Bolshevism have been hammering it into the masses that dictatorship is a vital necessity for the defense of the so-called proletarian interests against the assaults of counter-revolution and for paving the way for socialism.

The police represent the authority of the state, the willingness of the state to use violence to assert their will.

If all our comrades of Europe, America and other countries, who do not understand what we are doing to Spanish anarchism, would come to Spain, we could then see how they would react.

What we want, therefore, is the complete destruction of the domination and exploitation of man by man; we want men united as brothers by a conscious and desired solidarity, all cooperating voluntarily for the well-being of all; we want society to be constituted for the purpose of supplying everybody with the means for achieving the maximum well-being, the maximum possible moral and spiritual development; we want bread, freedom, love, and science - for everybody.

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.

In Russia, the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat has not led to socialism, but to the domination of a new bureaucracy over the proletariat and the whole people.

Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state.

Education is an important element in the struggle for human rights. It is the means to help our children and our people rediscover their identity and thereby increase their self respect. Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs only to the people who prepare for it today.

Now one thing white radicals must give up is the idea that the whole struggle hinges around white workers on their own deciding en masse to reject capitalism and racism.

It is important not to confuse federalism as it is understood by the Paris Commune with the so-called federalism which exists in Switzerland and in the United States of America.

Justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men... if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence.

Intellectuals: put yourself at the service of the weak. Meditate upon this; this is the really urgent work.

The coming Revolution could render no greater service to humanity than by making the wage system, in all its forms, an impossibility, and by rendering Communism, which is the negation of wage-slavery, the only possible solution.

The fact that Sacco and Vanzetti were murdered although obviously innocent proves only one thing: that the concept of innocence and guilt is not an objective fact but is a measure imposed by the class struggle.

Parliament: A compound word from "parler" (to speak) and "mentir" (to lie).

So that is why anarchists keep coming back to the question of what anarchism is. Because anarchism is not a political movement. Or rather it is, but only in a minor aspect.

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

There are socialists all over the world, by the millions; but where is socialism... political socialism is politics without socialism, and nothing else.

The right of revolution, which tyrants, in mockery, accord to mankind, is no legal right under a government; it is only a natural right to overturn a governmentent. The government itself never acknowledges this right.

Marxist schools have authors. Just as Marxism sprang from the mind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists, Trotksyites, Gramscians, Althusserians... Now consider the different schools of anarchism. There are Anarcho-Syndicalists, Anarcho-Communists, Insurrectionists, Cooperativists, Individualists, Platformists... None are named after some great thinker; instead, they are invariably named either after some kind of practice, or most often, organizational principle.

Government is as unreal, as intangible, as unapproachable as God.

The individual, his freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa: society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the higher, the more fully the individual is developed, the greater his freedom.

Each of you hungry tramps who read these lines, avail yourselves of those little methods of warfare which science has placed in the hands of the poor man, and you will become a power in this or any other land. Learn the use of explosives!

It is the task of all comrades to think, study and prepare - and to do so with all speed and thoroughly because the times are "dynamic" and we must be ready for what might happen.

What one needs to do at every moment of one's life is to put an end to the old world and to begin a new world.

Anarchy is the negation of all authority.

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

To achieve liberation, we must reject the binary gender system, which divides us into two mutually exclusive categories.

Dictatorship, the most extreme form of tyranny, can never lead to social liberation.

No, Henry VIII could never have obtained an air conditioner or computer. But Henry VIII didn't spend half his month's income on rent, or live a single paycheck away from eviction.

I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free.

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.

The struggles of doctrinal exclusivism languish at present. My desire is to have contributed to making them disappear entirely.

The future social revolution must take into account the circumstance that the industry and agriculture inherited by it from capitalism would not be uniform in the degrees of development of their various branches.

We must tear down the pyramids, the tumuli, the tombs. We must bring the wheelbarrows into the cemeteries so as to rid humanity of what they call respect for the dead, but which is the cult of carrion.

Like it or not, the future of life on this planet pivots on the future of society.

One who pays some attention to history will not be surprised if those who cry most loudly that we must smash and destroy are later found among the administrators of some new system of repression.

By anarchist spirit I mean that deeply human sentiment, which aims at the good of all, freedom and justice for all, solidarity and love among the people; which is not an exclusive characteristic only of self-declared anarchists, but inspires all people who have a generous heart and an open mind.

If you wish to remain men, do not be soldiers; if you cannot stand humiliations do not don the uniform. If, however, you have already committed the imprudence of clothing yourselves therewith, and some day you find yourselves in the situation of being unable to control your indignation, then neither insult nor strike your superiors; LET DAYLIGHT THROUGH THEM! You will pay no more for it.

Revolution can never stop.

To go towards freedom, it becomes necessary to develop our individuality.

The task of teachers, those obscure soldiers of civilization, is to give to the people the intellectual means to revolt.

Governmental communism, like theocratic communism, is repugnant to the worker.

They may kill me, but they cannot kill my ideas. They can crush my body, but they will not be able to crush my spirit

Anarchist communism in Spain differs from collectivism in that it denies all organization for the present and for the future.

Idlers do not make history: they suffer it!

A corporate elite of managers and owners governs the economy and the political system.

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!"

It is the system, rather than individuals, that is the source of pollution and degradation.

As soon as one identifies, challenges and overcomes illegitimate power, he or she is an anarchist. Most people are anarchists.

All that marching music doesn't concern me.

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.

Anarchy is not perfection, it is not the absolute ideal which like the horizon recedes as fast as we approach it; but it is the way open to all progress and all improvements for the benefit of everybody.

The word "state" is identical with the word "war."

The people are conservative: they are satisfied with the society they find. The minority are innovators instead and therefore they rebel.

Children, by nature, are keen, passionate and curious. What was referred to as laziness is often merely an awakening of sensitivity, a psychological inability to submit to certain absurd duties, and a natural result of the distorted, unbalanced education given to them. This laziness, which leads to an insuperable reluctance to learn, is, contrary to appearances, sometimes proof of intellectual superiority and a condemnation of the teacher.

Well, mutual aid is a very critical and important thing. For a while, I was saying libertarians have no souls, but I promised them I wouldn't if they hammered home the importance of mutual aid.

I have a good idea that will exempt you from relying on others while still finding food naturally. How? By practicing communism.

Leninism constitutes, without any doubt, a return to the revolutionary spirit of Marxism, but it also constitutes a return to the fallacies and abstractions of Marxist metaphysics.

The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too.

Anarchists are committed to treating other people as equals, rather than as either masters or subordinates.

"Whoever denies authority and fights against it is an anarchist," said Sebastien Faure. The definition is tempting in its simplicity, but simplicity is the first thing to guard against in writing a history of anarchism.

The word anarchist seems to me too restrictive and I don't use it unless it is joined by the word communist.

If you consider yourself a centrist, you're being played.

It is the lash of hunger which compels the poor man to submit. In order to live he must sell -- "voluntarily" sell -- himself every day and hour to the "beast of property."

If power is to be abolished it must be abolished not by force but by men's consciousness of its uselessness and evil.

As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

Individualist anarchism and communist anarchism are the same, or nearly so, in terms of moral motivations and ultimate goals.

Admittedly, I do have several bones - whole war fields full of bones, in fact - to pick with organised religion of whatever stripe.

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

Impossibility never prevented anything from happening.

I think government should be treated like religion, everyone should be able to pick the kind they like. Only it should be contractual not obligatory.

I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow.

The anarchist conclusion is that every kind of human activity should begin from what from what is local and immediate, should link in a network with no centre and no directing agency, hiving off new cells as the original grows.

It is from the love of humanity that we are revolutionaries: it is not our fault if history has forced on us this distressing necessity.

All the results of the mistakes of governments are quite admirable.

We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.

The anarchists never have claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow authority.

Masters aren't necessary, these people whose idleness is maintained by our labor; everyone must make himself useful to society, by which I mean work according to his ability and his aptitude.

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.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

No future and no humanity, no communism and no anarchy is worthy of the sacrifice of my life.

This perversion of the ethical values soon crystallized into the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party: THE END JUSTIFIES ALL MEANS.

This flagrant negation of humanity which constitutes the very essence of the state is, from the standpoint of the state, its supreme duty and its greatest virtue.

The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.

Let us not lose time asking an imaginary god for what only human effort can obtain for us.

Federalism is socialist, and for it solidarity is inseparable from liberty.

Not all those who are considered anarchists are pure anarchists. Tolstoy and Kropotkin have to be thrown out, having very little anarchy in their systems. They are anarchists only in the political sphere, and in all other relations between people they remain ardent communists.

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.

Then hang us! Here we will tread upon a spark, but there, and there, and behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up.

Whosoever looks back on the history of socialism after the exclusion of the anarchists can see for themselves the gradual degeneration of Marxism as a political philosophy through the interpretations and practices of the social democrats.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

The conditions of contemporary life encircle the workers on all sides, surround them, like water surrounds fish in the sea. The workers are not able to escape from these conditions.

Police are bureaucrats with weapons.

No one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live; no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential unless you invite them to.

Proudhon was an anti-authoritarian, anti-statist communist, a federalist communist. Was he a communist without knowing it? No, he suspected it, and he said it, at least once.

Hanged in Chicago, beheaded in Germany, garroted in Jerez, shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Montbrison and in Paris, our dead are many; but you have not been able to destroy anarchy.

The liberal government of Spain could have rendered the fascist elements powerless long ago. Instead it compromised and dallied.

I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.

The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; ie, by people relating to one another differently.

The freedom of everyone, and thereby the freedom of each individual, requires community in socialism.

No, there is no need to fear life without government; we long for it with all of our hearts.

Power never takes a back step -- only in the face of more power.

There is, therefore, no solution possible other than an economy directed by the workers through their organizations of control -- through the workers' syndicates.

There is no such thing as harmless power.

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."

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

In Spain, we should have enough intelligence, enough sense of individual and collective responsibility to do for ourselves that which would be imposed upon us by a dictatorship.

The criminalization of debt was the criminalization of the very basis of human society.

Most anarchists believe the coming change can only come through a revolution, because the possessing class will not allow a peaceful change to take place; still we are willing to work for peace at any price, except at the price of liberty.

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.

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.

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.

The poor are to blame for there being rich men.

Revolution is an inalienable right of mankind. Freedom is an imperishable birth right of all

A structure based on centuries of history cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of explosives.

In this way, the state commune transforms the workers into soulless parts in the huge, centralised communist machine, parts who are obliged to be directed for their whole lives to a single purpose -- the maximum fulfilment of certain production tasks decreed by the state, and who are condemned to a minimum field of initiative, independent action and personal choice.

All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism.

The majority can hardly accept the existence of anything but the two extremes: masters and slaves.

Catholics and other Christians are against abortions and they're against homosexuals. Well who has less abortions than homosexuals?

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

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?

I can feel free only in the presence of and in relationship with other men.

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.

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.

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production, and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.

Without doubt, conventional right, contract and law, even universally and directly exercised, is not natural right, or justice. It is a compromise between anarchy and authority, and everything that is not completely just is injustice.

If the federal government had access to every email you've ever written and every phone call you've ever made, it's almost certain that they could find something you've done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don't know it yet.

A libertarian is just a Republican who takes drugs.

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

He who refuses to submit is at once labelled "queer," "different," and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life.

A worker is a part-time slave.

And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act, - at least in theory.

Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

Bodies and the bullets are real. Painfully real. The concrete does not self-organize into the Wall. No border, invented by humans minds, asserts its own existence. No gun shoots itself. There is human action behind every border, every wall.

People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.

All social arrangements should admit of this freedom of choice of every individual and all subordination should be voluntary.

The only revolution is to improve yourself, hoping that others follow. Then the world will improve.

Governmental communism, like theocratic communism, is repugnant to the worker.

I mean, "chaos" is a meaning of the word, but it's not a meaning that has any relevance to social thought. Anarchy as a social philosophy has never meant "chaos" - in fact, anarchists have typically believed in a highly organized society, just one that's organized democratically from below.

It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism.

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.

Anarchism is just the way people act when they are free to do as they choose, and when they deal with others who are equally free.

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

If you say that you reject violence when it exceeds the limits imposed by the needs of defense, they accuse you of pacifism, without understanding that violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism, just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism.

The aims of anarchists and true communists are identical.

Was traditional anarchism, idealistic and prone to splits, not destined to fail as soon as it found itself confronted by an implacable social struggle, for which it was not in the least way prepared?

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?

Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.

To us it means nothing that there is a Soviet Union somewhere in the world, for the sake of whose peace and tranquility the workers of Germany and China were sacrificed to Fascist barbarians by Stalin.

Anarchic socialism and the revolutionary spirit still survive in Spain; they will do their work and the solidarity of the other nations will not fail us.

In anarchy the Russian, Finn, Jew, Georgian, and Ukrainian are not enemies, but comrades. In short, there is only one conclusion: anarchy inevitably leads to internationalism.

We must do the impossible -- rid the world of nations, bringing the play of intelligent anarchy into a world environment.

There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable.

There are even moments when the authority of the socialists and communists is worse than the bourgeois, for they tear down their own ideas and trample on them.

To monotonously live the mouldy hours of the ordinary people, the submissive, the accommodated, a life of convenience, is not living, it is only vegetating and carrying around an amorphous mass of flesh and bones. To life one should give the exquisite elevation of the rebellion of the arms and the mind.

I am an individualist because I am an anarchist; and I am an anarchist because I am a nihilist.

Non-Profit Anarchist Clothing Coop ★ Free Worldwide Shipping On ALL Orders!