Anarchist Quotes – Page 5 – Daily quotes from anarchist philosophers – Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Durruti, Emma Goldman, and more

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.

The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.

Pagan anarchists don't make rules for other people. No one is saying that a Pagan is not allowed to be a supporter of capitalism. You're always allowed to do whatever you choose-but that doesn't mean it makes sense.

We must make the world safe for poverty without dependence on government.

Do something right for once: throw off the straitjacket of legislation; wash yourself off, and clean your body, the social body, of all the parasites and vermin that are devouring you. And then - only then - will you be able to fully come to life.

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

It has come to pass in history that the workers have defeated capitalism, but the victory then slipped from their grasp, because some state power emerged, amalgamating the interests of private capitalism and those of state capitalism for the sake of success over the toilers.

To weaken authority and criticize its acts is not enough. A negation, in order to be absolute, needs to complete itself with an affirmation. That is why I affirm liberty, why I deduce its consequences.

Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is the exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak.

We have no need to get involved with the games of our oppressors, unless we wish to take part in their oppression.

The CNT's prisoners will have to thank the politicians for their release, and that to me who am an anarchist, has enormous implications. I would like to walk free thanks to the efforts of my comrades and not due to the philanthropy of someone whom I have to fight tooth and nail as soon as I am out.

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.

The critical human flaw is not that as a species we're particularly aggressive. It's that we tend to respond to aggression very poorly.

Anarchists have a 'bad name' in the media, not because they can point to one indiscriminate massacre by anarchists--there have been none--but because the one thing holders of power fear is that they personally should be held responsible for their own actions

The Left (including the Black nationalist movement) really is in a backward stage. Rather than building on the legacy of the 1960's protests, we are instead losing ground and taking reactionary positions.

Private property has crushed true individualism, and set up an individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road and encumbering them.

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

No serious-minded man would venture to predict exactly how the Revolution, the indispensable condition for social renovation, will come about.

All past revolutions were in the end, bourgeois and conservative.

In the first place, we are unequivocally opposed to the doctrine of total depravity. We hold that men are depraved only in so far as their surroundings make them so, and if those surroundings were removed, their depravity would disappear.

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

The love of liberty and the sense of human dignity are the basic elements of the anarchist creed.

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.

The inherent tendency of the state is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities.

Wherever there is a man who exercizes authority, there is a man who resists authority.

Philosophy will not change the course of events: destiny will fulfill itself regardless of prophecy. Besides, must not justice be done and our education be finished?

The Communist power installed itself by military force, not only when the Bolsheviks occupied a place after a battle to drive out the Petliurists, but also in places where the region was already free and the peasants were on their own.

Proletarians of the world, look into the depths of your own beings, seek out the truth and realise it yourselves: you will find it nowhere else.

One who is constantly striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a machine himself and loses all human feeling.

Actually inventing or producing things is at best the path to small-time wealth. The really big fortunes -- the billionaire kind -- instead come from controlling the circumstances under which other people are allowed to produce things.

The only generals that we should follow are the generals of the little tin soldiers.

In the face of dogmas, of despots, of the sentimental, of charlatans and regimenters, humanity's future belongs to reason.

Patriotism: a willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

Instead of inanely repeating the old formula, "Respect the law," we say, "Despise law and all its attributes!"

Good people don't much like those who tread a different path.

For those who stubbornly seek freedom around the world, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination.

Nine-tenths of the activities of modern government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.

I think it can be clearly proven that the mental constitution of woman, like that of man, has never failed to rise where restrictions upon equal freedom have been torn down.

Libertarians make a dogma of liberty; anarchists make it an end.

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

Bigness, or oversize, is really much more than just a social problem. It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation.

Modern anarcho-syndicalism is a direct continuation of those social aspirations which took shape in the bosom of the First International and which were best understood and most strongly held by the libertarian wing of the great workers' alliance.

Common to all Anarchists is the desire to free society of all political and social coercive institutions which stand in the way of development of a free humanity.

The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.

Capitalism -- a system of power in which ownership and control are divorced from labor -- could not survive in a free market.

We need to return to heroic anarchism, to individual, violent, reckless, poetic, decentering audacity...

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

Fortunately, no country was ever more suited for anarchist agitation than present-day America.

The sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning.

"Communist society"; in the sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principle - could never exist. But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.

The Cold War serves as a useful device for the managers of American society and their counterparts in the Soviet Union to control their own populations and their own respective imperial systems.

The habit of direct action is, perhaps, identical with the habit of being free, prepared to live responsibly in a free society.

Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all.

The proprietor, producing neither by his own labor nor by his implement, and receiving products in exchange for nothing, is either a parasite or a thief.

We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.

The main difference between the anarchists and the socialists, including the Marxists, lies in the fact that while the socialists maintain that the state must be taken over as the first step toward its dissolution, the anarchists argue that, since power corrupts, any seizure of the existing structure of authority can only lead to its perpetuation.

In existing states a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil.

Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.

Queer theory seeks to disrupt the normal with the same impulse that anarchists do with relations of hierarchy, exploitation, and oppression.

The spirit which animates Emma Goldman is the only one which will emancipate the slave from his slavery, the tyrant from his tyranny - the spirit which is willing to dare and suffer.

The sworn enemy of your emancipation is the state: it is best embodied by the union of these five stereotypes: the property-owner, the soldier, the judge, the priest and the one who serves them all, the intellectual.

I believe in the human soul regnant over all laws which man has made or will make; I believe there is no peace now, and there will never be peace, so long as one rules over another; I believe in the total disintegration and dissolution of the principle and practice of authority; I am an anarchist, and if for this you condemn me, I stand ready to receive your condemnation.

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.

If the state would only remove those laws that stand in the way of free land, free money, and transportation, its other statutes would, in course of time, become useless and "repeal" themselves.

An anarchist is a man who is careful to always use pedestrian crossings, because he utterly detests talking with policemen.

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing.

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.

Anarchism is the usher of science - the master of ceremonies to all forms of truth. It would remove all barriers between the human being and natural development.

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

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

There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.

A person is strong only when he stands upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts from his deepest convictions.

The individual is quite a world of federations, a whole universe in himself.

We cannot help but believe that were every law, every title deed, every court, and every police officer or soldier abolished tomorrow with one sweep, we would be better off than now.

The anarchist ideal is large and rich in its diversity. Nevertheless, the role of anarchists in the social struggle of the masses is extremely modest. Their task is to help the masses take the right road in the struggle and in the construction of the new society.

Socialism and communism both demand a degree of joint effort and administration which would beget more regulation than is wholly consistent with ideal anarchism.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

The man who would completely isolate himself from his fellow men, would return to the state of a brute animal, if the better armed species had not killed him before.

The aim is not therefore to liberate some 'essential self' by throwing off the burden of government and the State, but to develop the self in creative and voluntary relations with others.

The anarchists reject the path of parliamentary activity. Their tactics are based on the principle of direct action: mass protests, strikes, boycott, sabotage and other methods of direct influence.

The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up.

All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate every one's part in the production of the world's wealth.

Any pretense of reducing the role of state in capitalism is a lie. It is impossible to smash the state without, as an immediate consequence, smashing capitalism along with it.

The [specifically anarchist] organization is not a union or contractual understanding between individuals bringing their own artificial ideological convictions. It arises and develops as an organic, natural way because it corresponds to a real need.

In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible.

We are not ready to fight because we love fighting. We are ready to fight because we are worth fighting for.

It is society that makes criminals and you, jury members, instead of striking you should use your intelligence and your strength to transform society. In one fell swoop you'll suppress all crime. And your work, in attacking causes, will be greater and more fruitful than your justice, which belittles itself in punishing its effects.

The real sense of gradualism remains the same: everything in nature and in life changes by degrees, and this is no less true of anarchy. It can only come about little by little.

There is nothing proletarian -- or revolutionary about immoralist cynicism.

The demand for equality is nothing other than the demand: equal rights for all!

For anarchists, the state is much more than an expression of class and economic power. Rather the state has its own logic of domination and self-perpetuation, and is autonomous from class interests.

And as you are invaded and violated, so you subconsciously revenge yourself by invading and violating others over whom you have authority or can exercise compulsion. physical or moral. In this way all life has become a crazy quilt of authority, of domination and submission, of command and obedience, of coercion and subjection, of rulers and ruled, of violence and force in a thousand and one forms.

There is one common struggle against those who have appropriated the earth, the money, and the machines.

Dictatorship, whether it is a hydra with a hundred heads or a hundred tails, whether they are autocratic or demagogic, can certainly do nothing for liberty: it can only perpetuate slavery, morally and physically.

The CNT which is the most powerful organisation in Spain must take up its rightful place in the collective order. Its battles must be in tune with its greatness.

The revolutionary trade unions, in the view of the anarchists, are not only organs of the struggle against the contemporary structure; they are also the cells of the future society.

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.

Freedoms are not given, they are taken.

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.

If you feel the need to vote in order to avert the immediate threat of fascism, by all means do so... in the meantime, we have a new society to build.

Federalism is above all the negation of the nation and the state.

Those that envision the goal from the first steps, those that want the certitude of reaching it before walking never arrive.

Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience.

Nothing wrong with communist anarchism as long as it remains voluntary. Any one that wants to go make a commune, go ahead, do it. I got nothing against it. As long as there's room to the individualist to do his or her own thing.

As regards the mestizo population [of mixed Indian and Spanish heritage], which is the majority of the people of Mexico - with the exception of those who inhabited the great cities and large towns - they held the forests, lands, and bodies of water in common, just as the indigenous peoples did.

The paramount question of the day is not political, is not religious, but is economic. The crying-out demand of today is for a circle of principles that shall forever make it impossible for one man to control another by controlling the means of his existence.

People get accustomed to the established order of things and tremble at the idea of change. It is this lethargic spirit that needs be replaced by the revolutionary spirit

What consoles me is that there are combatants that remain, because despite all the persecution, the anarchist idea has germinated and the theoretical revolution is ending, being quickly replaced by the practice of action.

There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money.

The State is said by some to be a "necessary evil"; it must be made unnecessary.

Whoever calls himself revolutionary and speaks of dictatorship is only an imbecile or a traitor.

Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth!

Only in respecting their human character do I respect my own.

Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate domination.

Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place.

The state idea means something quite different from the idea of government.

When we have but the will to do it, that very moment will Justice be done: that very instant the tyrants of the Earth shall bite the dust.

It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.

Man will only be able to act usefully when he will have managed to destroy all lies, freed himself from all the superstitions given birth to by error, sought the truth in the jumble of knowledge and observations.

I believe that it behooves every honest man to urge the toiling masses not to let the flames of revolution be extinguished.

The "government of all the people", if we have to have government, can at best be only the government of the majority.

Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Bakunin was unquestionably inferior to Marx as a political economist. His economics are Marxist, and he subscribed enthusiastically to Marx's theory of surplus value and dissection of the capitalist system.

Nobody scolded or hated capitalism more than him, but the subtle mind of Proudhon saw the vileness of communism.

Merciless criticism and independent thinking are two traits of revolutionary thinking. Lovers, lunatics and poets are made of the same stuff

Always and everywhere among us, practical problems have been resolved by a majority of votes.

America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind.

Libertarian communism is as yet only an approximation, and not a dogma of absolute truth.

Wars are, probably, the greatest of all destroyers of property, and they originate chiefly in two roots. First, for direct or indirect plunder; secondly, for the privileges of governing.

Infinite diversity instead of unity is inevitable, especially in the progressive or transitionary stage.

A different conception of society, very different from that which now prevails, is in process of formation.

This brings us to anarchism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the state should be abolished.

Spirit, like flame, like freedom, like creativeness, is opposed to any social stagnation or any lifeless tradition.

Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control.

Miss Goldman is a communist; I am an individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property, I wish to assert it.

The subject is not whether we accomplish anarchism today, tomorrow, or within ten centuries, but that we walk towards anarchism today, tomorrow, and always.

It makes a lot of sense, if you accept capitalist system, to try to accumulate property, not just because you want material welfare, but because that guarantees your freedom.

Fate and freedom alike play a part in history; and there are times, as in wars and revolutions, when fate is the stronger of the two.

Never will the anarchists in Spain be made to suffer as they have been and are in Russia.

Anarchism embraces two worlds: the world of philosophy, of ideas, and the world of practice, of activity. The two are intimately linked.

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.

Like such titles as Christian and Quaker, "anarchist" was in the end proudly adopted by one of those against whom it had been used in condemnation.

The most complete freedom for the individual, his right to full satisfaction of all his needs, are absolutely legitimate claims, and there was no need to go out to dig up Nietszche and Stirner to give them some consecration.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

Queer is the abnormal, the strange, the dangerous. Queer involves our sexuality and our gender, but so much more. it is our desire and fantasies and more still. Queer is the cohesion of everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world.

The true and legitimate meaning of the word treason, then, necessarily implies treachery, deceit, breach of faith. Without these, there can be no treason.

The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.

It is the duty of us poor people to work and struggle to break the chains that make us slaves.

One should always be a little improbable.

True intellectual culture and the demand for higher interests in life does not become possible until man has achieved a certain material standard of living, which makes him capable of these.

If on the one side we do not harbor the illusion that the entire proletariat must be enlightened before it can be called into battle, so on the other we do not doubt that as much enlightenment as possible must be produced with oral and printed agitation.

A dictatorial committee composed of workers is certainly the thing one could find most inflated with self-importance and nullity and, consequently, the most anti-revolutionary.

The state, the society, the institutions, the body politic, the nation, the system, or customs we live in, must not be permitted to become primary, but must be secondary!

History is written by the victors.

The category of the "worker," defined in the strict Marxian economic sense, and politically constituted through the revolutionary vanguard whose goal was the dictatorship of the proletariat, no longer seems viable.

The Bolshevik practice of the last ten years shows clearly the counter-revolutionary role of their dictatorship of the Party.

Every person who ever thought he had a right to assert, and went boldly and asserted it, himself, or jointly with others that shared his convictions, was a direct actionist.

We must fight authority and privilege, while taking advantage from the benefits that civilization has conferred. We must not destroy anything that satisfies human need however badly - until we have something better to put in its place.

If there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind.

Do not quarrel or deal in personalities. Listen to opposing arguments after you have presented your own. Learn how to remain silent and reflect. Do not try to get the better in an argument at the expense of your own sincerity.

A small group of comrades, a small group who simply meet in the evening to have a chat would not be an affinity group but a group of friends, pub-mates who meet in the evenings to talk about anything under the sun.

It is a sad sight to see those who believe themselves to be revolutionaries unleashing their hatred on the anarchist.

What constitutes equity is the greatest question of all. It is the "unknown quantity" that even algebra has failed to furnish!

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

I think the role of the revolutionary movement is still in workplace organising, but I also think, in community organisation.

The anarchist is the one who refuses every cause for the joy of his life radiating from inner spiritual intensity.

To condone ferocious anti-human feelings and raise them to the level of principle as a tactic for a movement... is both evil and counter-revolutionary.

The existing system will be quickest and most radically overthrown by the annihilation of its exponents. Therefore, massacres of the enemies of the people must be set in motion.

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value.

To my mind, the struggle for liberty is too great and the few steps we have gained have been won at too great a sacrifice, for the great mass of the people of this 20th century to consent to turn over to any political party the management of our social and industrial affairs.

[Warren and Proudhon's idea] originated independently, just as like Leibniz and Newton invented the calculus, or Darwin and Wallace invented the theory of evolution simultaneously, Warren and Proudhon devoted a great deal of energy to the mutual banking idea.

In vices, the very essence of crime - that is, the design to injure the person or property of another - is wanting.

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.

In its mad passion for power, the communist state even sought to strengthen and deepen the very ideas and conceptions which the Revolution had come to destroy.

I passionately love humanity, and have dedicated my best efforts to the fight for the oppressed. All tyrants disgust me -- and all those who put up with them, adulate them, support them. After having brought them down will I make myself a tyrant in their place? I would be disgusted with myself.

It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep.

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.

Resignation is death. Revolt is life.

Somebody once declared that the only two political theories that are completely consistent are anarchy and totalitarianism. Anarchy fully embraces the concept of self, totalitarianism fully rejects that concept.

All that which is not liberty is against liberty. Liberty is not a thing that can be allocated.

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.

In the name of Purity what lies are told! What queer morality it has engendered. For fear of it you dare not tell your own children the truth about their birth; the most sacred of all functions, the creation of a human being, is a subject for the most miserable falsehood.

We have come more and more under the dominance of mechanics and sacrificed living humanity to the dead rhythm of the machine without most of us even being conscious of the monstrosity of the procedure.

What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.

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.

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.

You complain, but you want to maintain the system where you vegetate. Occasionally you rebel, but it's only ever just to start doing the same thing again from scratch.

The true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.

The morality which is born out of the present conception of the state and social hierarchy is necessarily corrupt.

An anarchist is someone who doesn't need a cop to make him behave.

I am an anarchist not because I believe anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal.

The complete transformation of everyone's living conditions can never be achieved on the path of slow development, through which at most improvements within a social system are possible.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

Ironically, the world idealized by primitivists would actually preclude the radical individualism celebrated by the individualist heirs of Max Stirner.

The real transformation of society will come only in love, in work, and in stillness.

But though egoism or altruism, separately, each pushed to its extreme, is pernicious to the individual and society, united they are resolved into a third term, which is the law of future societies. This law is solidarity.

No government in the world fights fascism to the death. When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to fascism to maintain itself.

Did the seed of tyranny ever bear good fruit? And can you expect liberty to undo in a moment what oppression has been doing for ages?

If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.

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