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

If this is the road we must take, we cannot do it sustained and fettered by some phoney unproductive sentimentalism without also setting obstacles in the path of what we seek to advance as the goal of energetic rebellion.

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.

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.

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.

Between these two classes, and with the growth of manufacture and commerce, there arose an intermediate class whose affluence depended on personal ingenuity and ability, in whose attitude entered little of either the master or slave psychology but who clearly saw that their well-being depended on the freedom to exercise their abilities.

We'll burn off our last round against the cops, and if they don't care to come, we'll certainly know how to find them.

Revolution can never stop.

I am not myself free or human until or unless I recognize the freedom and humanity of all my fellowmen.

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.

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.

The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

The worst crime of any type of state is just that it always tries to force the rich diversity of social life into definite forms and adjust it to one particular form, which allows for no wider outlook and regards the previously exciting status as finished.

No one wants a boss, to be a boss, to work under a boss. The people you like working with are the people you respect as individuals.

The urge to destory is a creative urge.

From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.

The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.

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

One can lose one's illusions about everything and about everyone, but not about what one affirms with one's moral conscience.

The Roman Empire was a state in the real sense of the word. To this day it remains the legist's ideal.

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

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.

I envy the savages. And I will cry to them in a loud voice: "Save yourselves, civilization is coming."

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

I hate communism because it is the negation of liberty and because for me humanity is unthinkable without liberty. I am not a communist, because communism concentrates and swallows up in itself for the benefit of the state all the forces of society, because it inevitably leads to the concentration of property in the hands of the state.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The anti-sexualism of authoritarian societies and the people who run them does not spring from conviction (they themselves have sex), but from the vague perception that freedom here might lead to a liking for freedom elsewhere.

Let us light the fuse on the dynamite of vengeance!

For a long time I have been fascinated by the thought how wonderful it would be if at last, in public opinion on the succession of political and social institutions, the fateful term "one after another" would be replaced through the very simple and self-evident "simultaneously."

Since the birth of the state, the world of politics has always been and continues to be the stage for unlimited rascality and brigandage.

As a credo, individualist anarchism remained largely a bohemian lifestyle, most conspicuous in its demands for sexual freedom ("free love") and enamored of innovations in art, behavior, and clothing.

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

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.

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."

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

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

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

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.

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

Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.

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.

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.

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

What is property? It is robbery!

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!

Terrorism is tempting with its tremendous possibilities. It offers a mechanical solution, as it were, in hopeless situations.

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.

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

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.

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

That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Take the principle that two wrongs don't make a right. If you really took it seriously, that alone would knock away almost the entire basis for war and the criminal justice system.

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.

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

If today we fall without compromising, we can be sure of victory tomorrow.

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.

Man becomes conscious of himself and his humanity only in society and only by the collective action of the whole society.

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.

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.

What would have happened if one had really managed to enter the base and destroy it? I don't know. Probably nothing, possibly everything.

All laws are wicked, all judgments are unfair, all judges are wrong, all prisoners are innocent.

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

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

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

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

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

It's called the American Dream, 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it.

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

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

The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.

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.

All things are Nothing to Me

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am not a thief but a sincere revolutionary, who has the courage of his convictions and who is devoted to his cause.

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

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.

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

Our destiny is to reach that state of ideal perfection in which nations will no longer need to be under the tutelage of a government or of another nation; it is the absence of government, it is anarchy, the highest expression of order.

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!"

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

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.

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

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

Only when one understands that she or he is part of a revolutionary movement to restructure society, even if it only wins immediate gains in the early stages, can the talk of functional "unity" be given any credence whatsoever.

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.

Once for all, then, we are not opposed to the punishment of thieves and murderers; we are opposed to their manufacture.

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

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."

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.

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.

The anarchists, on behalf of the proletariat, therefore consider it necessary to show the proletariat that it will have to win a gigantic battle before it realizes its goals.

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.

Like an operating system, the State defines us in relation to itself and each other. It defines us, for example, as citizens or residents, households and taxpayers. And these definitions make clear whether the state approves of our behavior.

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

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

The one thing that the public dislike is novelty.

He who negates present society, and seeks social conditions based on the sharing of property, is a revolutionary whether he calls himself an anarchist or a communist.

Anarchism is based on an essentially optimistic conception of human nature: if individuals have a natural tendency to get on well together then there is no need for the existence of a state to arbitrate between them.

I repeat that I am a political prisoner. The prosecution, whatever the attorney general may say, is political and nothing else.

In the pettiest struggle, born of the needs of the moment, there must be mirrored the great goal of social liberation, and each such struggle must help to smooth the way and strengthen the spirit which transforms the inner longing of its bearers into will and deed.

Abundant cheap credit would drastically alter the balance of power between capital and labor, and returns on labor would replace returns on capital as the dominant form of economic activity.

Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never.

He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter, but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.

The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.

The most that a working-class party could do, even if its politicians remained honest, would be to form a strong faction in the legislatures which might, by combining its vote with one side or another, win certain political or economic palliatives.

"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 legitimate, the equitable compensation for the loan of money, is the cost of labor in lending it and receiving it back again.

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.

In place of the cowardly phrase, "Obey the law," our cry is "Revolt against all laws!"

Basically, if you're not a utopianist, you're a schmuck.

Anarchists believe we can run our lives without the government.

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

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

Considering that our culture invented napalm and nuclear weapons, I'm not sure we're in a position to judge the smaller scale violence of other cultures.

The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. The only thing that can console one for being rich is economy.

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.

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

What economists call over-production is but a production that is above the purchasing power of the worker, who is reduced to poverty by capital and state.

When you create Hope in people, you create expectations. When you do not fulfill those expectations, when the change becomes more of the same old, same old, the Hope that was created can only turn to anger, frustration and bitter disappointment.

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

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

It’s hard to imagine a surer sign that one is dealing with an irrational economic system than the fact that the prospect of eliminating drudgery is considered to be a problem.

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.

One could wager, considering the number of anarchists when Franco took over, probably a considerable portion of the Spanish population are still anarchists. And if they could get out from under the Franco dictatorship they could attempt to implement anarchism once again.

I know that I live and that I desire to live.

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

An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.

Extractivism is as predatory as capitalism, necessitating the repeated destruction of nature and social life.

Fascism may be briefly described as the reluctant acquiescence of capitalists to governmental regimentation in order to stem the increasing impotency of a one-sided wealth accumulation to satisfy the needs of a country.

The revolution will be the flowering of humanity as love is the flowering of the heart.

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.

I do not expect any help for a libertarian revolution from any government in the world... we expect no help, not even from our own government, in the last analysis.

While we do preach perfect communism, it is not in the certainty or expectation of communism's being the social form of the future: it is in order to further men's education, and round it off as completely as possible, so that, by the time that the day of conflagration comes, they will have attained maximum emancipation.

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

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.

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.

The state without slavery is unthinkable - and this is why we are the enemies of the state.

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

Things tend to organise themselves. If there is any message from contemporary science, it is surely that.

Whoever says "proletarian State" says "State Capitalism" whoever says "dictatorship of the Proletariat" says "Dictatorship of the Communist Party;" whoever says "strong government" says "Tsarist oligarchy of politicians."

Money should be for ponies, not for war, I think.

Is work a social or a natural law? Work is a natural law worsened by society.

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

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

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

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.

Where the state lacks means of coercion, it is important to control what people think.

Police are bureaucrats with weapons.

Anarchy is synonymous with Socialism. Because both signify the abolition of exploitation and of the domination of man over man, whether maintained by the force of arms or by the monopolization of the means of life.

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.

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

Power has become invincible, and rests no longer on the higher national foundations of anointed right, election, or representation, but on violence alone.

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.

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

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.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

The individualist is like a wolf who prefers the dangers of liberty to the routine of domestication. Individualists compare themselves to the bird who would prefer to suffer and struggle on its branch than to die a slow death in the servitude of a gilded cage.

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

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