Anarchist Quotes – Page 4 – Daily quotes from anarchist philosophers – Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Durruti, Emma Goldman, and more

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

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.

If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them.

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.

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

It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and to restrain the violence of the state.

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

The government of man by man (under whatever name it be disguised) is oppression.

The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever.

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.

History shows us that the most beneficial works, which were most effective in achieving their beneficial purposes, were precisely those that were directly managed.

There is no such thing as harmless power.

When lifestyle anarchists call for autonomy rather than freedom, they thereby forfeit the rich social connotations of freedom.

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."

Man as we know him, in the highest actual stage of development, loves learning, yearns alter truth, and identifies his personal happiness with the realization and maintenance of his ideals.

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

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.

Anarchism seeks to arouse the consciousness of oppression, the desire for a better society, and a sense of the necessity for unceasing warfare against capitalism and the State.

The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.

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.

Whether individually or as a countless mass, man finds himself at the mercy of this band of drones going under the name of "governors and masters," when in reality they are nothing but straightforward exploiters and oppressors.

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

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

The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages. As a precaution to ever committing major acts of evil it is our solemn duty never to do what we're told, this is the only way we can be sure.

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.

I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion.

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

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.

As set forth by theologians, the idea of "God" is an argument that assumes its own conclusions, and proves nothing.

A libertarian is just a Republican who takes drugs.

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.

Idlers do not make history: they suffer it!

The fact that modern wars are fewer in number can hardly be considered a praiseworthy contribution to peace if we take into account the misery they spread from one end of the world to the other.

In the Middle Ages, there was war in some corner of Europe almost every day. But they were little wars with little effects because the powers waging them were little and their resources small.

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

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

The domination of man by the creation of man is even more ridiculous than the domination of man by man.

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.

The act of revolution brings an immediate transformation in the sense that the foundations of society are radically changed, but a progressive transformation in the sense that communism is a constant development.

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.

Many claim to speak in liberty's name, but few really understand her.

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried.

As a social anarchist, I believe that capitalism itself is an inherently exploitative hierarchical situation - you do have a boss, you do have somebody in charge.

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.

In certain intellectual circles in France, the very basis for discussion - minimal respect for facts and logic - has been virtually abandoned.

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.

The young whites, and blacks, too, are the only hope that America has, the rest of us have always been living in a lie.

Usually, when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

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

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

The peoples' revolution will arrange its revolutionary organization from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty.

For us, it is a matter of crushing fascism once and for all. Yes; and in spite of the government.

The point social ecology emphasizes is not that moral and spiritual persuasion and renewal are meaningless or unnecessary; they are necessary and can be educational. But modern capitalism is structurally amoral and hence impervious to moral appeals.

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

The realization of the usefulness of cooperation, which should have led to the triumph of solidarity in all human relations, instead gave rise to private property and government, that is to the exploitation of the labor of the whole community by a privileged minority.

I think it can be shown that the law makes ten criminals where it restrains one.

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

The Bolshevik government revealed itself to be powerless in the face of a bureaucracy which is super-abundant, parasitic, despotic and dishonest.

Plebeian and bourgeois are equivalent. They deserve each other.

Patriotism is the vice of nations.

Never ever separate thought from action, the things we know, the things we understand, from the things we do, the things with which we carry out our actions.

After all, it means thirteen dollars per month, three meals a day, and a place to sleep. Yet even necessity is not sufficiently strong a factor to bring into the army an element of character and manhood.

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

The Makhnovist movement was founded on the deep feeling of fraternity which characterizes only the most oppressed. During its entire history it did not for an instant appeal to national sentiments.

What do I, a proletarian, care for the tranquility and security of the rich? I care as little for public order as for the proprietor's safety. I ask to live a laborer; otherwise I will die a warrior.

Non-violent resistance activities cannot succeed against an enemy that is able freely to use violence.

We're supposed to worship Adam Smith but you're not supposed to read him. That's too dangerous. He's a dangerous radical.

Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society.

I despise humanity because it is not my humanity. I hate tyrants and I detest slaves.

Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.

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.

As a society, western democracies have moved beyond democracy into a new socio-economic formation, the formation/framework of the soft-totalitarian-state.

Eliminating the legal enforcement of DRM -- by criminal, mind, not civil law -- would effectively destroy all business models based on proprietary digital information.

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

Where crime exists, force must exist to repress it. Who denies it? Certainly not liberty; certainly not the anarchists.

Anarchism does not depend on theory or programs, which try to grasp man's life in its entirety. It is a teaching, which is based on real life, which outgrows all artificial limitations, which cannot be constricted by any system.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy.

Although a firm friend of order, I am (in the full force of the term) an anarchist.

Whoever has not emancipated himself will be left behind with the current movement and will seek redemption in vain. He will die a slave.

Generally speaking, individualists are mere philosophers rather than revolutionary activists.

I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly.

We no longer like to think about bureaucracy, yet it informs every aspect of out existence. It's as if as a planetary civilization, we have decided to clap out hands over our ears and start humming whenever the topic comes up.

The reaction always begins where one tries to bring life to a certain norm. That is why yesterday's revolutionaries so often become today's reactionaries.

If you consider these worthy electors as unable to look after their own interests themselves, how is it that they know how to choose for themselves the shepherds who must guide them? And how will they be able to solve this problem of social alchemy, of producing the election of a genius from the votes of a mass of fools?

I dislike communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.

Experience proves to the wise man that revolutions never have lasting results. Reason tells him that lies are not refuted by lies, and that violence isn't destroyed by violence.

The second element of freedom is negative. It is the revolt of the individual against all divine, collective, and individual authority.

During humankind's long centuries societies have risen and fallen, all alike in this one fact which rules all history: the great are protected, the small are crushed.

We are in a society where the power is in the hands of those who are the worst breed of humanity.

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.

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

The darkling plain is here. This is the waste land: England, America, Russia, China, Israel, France....And we are here as victims, or as spectators, or as perpetrators of tortures, massacres, poisonings, manipulations, despoliation.

We need do no more than repeat: only under communism does the individual become himself and lead his own life.

Man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.

As far as the problem of the state goes, the lesson of the Russian revolution is written on the wall for all to see.

Private capitalism, condemned by history, only survives today thanks to the arms race on the one hand, and the comparative failure of state communism on the other.

In this country, where we have no continuing anarchist tradition, the young hardly know their tendency at all.

Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.

Alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.

But we must create in each person a sense of responsibility in order that each one of us can have the right to enjoy all his rights.

Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.

Above all, what socialist, without flushing with shame, maintains he is not a revolutionary? We say: none!

We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregard them altogether, saying with regret they were impossible of realization. Now indeed they seem to be able to be brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonising problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realization?

We were founded on a very basic double standard: This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free.

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. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.

Be strong. Overflow with emotional and intellectual energy, and you will spread your intelligence, your love, your energy of action broadcast among others! This is what all moral teaching comes to.

Ableism and heteronormativity are both oppressive ideologies and cultural constructs that hinder the full potential of realizing the scope of human sexuality and modes of being in the world.

If there is a state, there must be domination of one class by another and, as a result, slavery.

The present Russian regime and the present order of things can not be called bourgeois -- still less can it be called socialistic or communistic.

To truly know freedom, one must develop the human being until one makes sure that no authority has the possibility of existing.

Ask a method? Do you ask Spring her method? Which is more necessary, the sunshine or the rain? They are contradictory - yes; they destroy each other - yes, but from this destruction the flowers result.

Our authority is our own conscience. She is the one that pushes us, she is our spur. We are slaves, but to our duty.

All my political ideas boil down to this formula: political federation or decentralization.

The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war.

The people themselves, and only the people, determine the rhythm of our fight.

I think my brief period in the Panthers was very important because it taught me about the limits of -- and even the bankruptcy of -- leadership in a revolutionary movement.

Nobody believes or expects that the coming revolution, however formidable it should be, will realize unadulterated anarchist communism.

Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations.

Property is impossible.

The revealed despotic character of state communism, Marxism, caused a reaction in the proletarian movement and brought about world Fascism in politics.

We have said and we shall not stop repeating it: no intermediaries, no agents and obedient servants who always end by becoming the real masters!

Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime? Is not the court of a tribunal a school of ferocity?

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.

The human animal is an animated alimentary canal. He has evolved from and differs from the worm only by the appendages which have developed on him.

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

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

The poor are to blame for there being rich men.

Anarchists no more want to be masters than they want to be servants - they no more want to exercise violence than to submit to it. They expose, they propose, but they do not impose.

I had been told that society's institutions were founded on justice and equality, and all around me I could see nothing but lies and treachery.

When I say Anarchism you hear Chaos, Violence, Mayhem. When I say Anarchism I mean Cooperation, Voluntary Association, Mutual Aid

Governments involve the citizen in national and state responsibilities from which he would choose to be exempt; under these circumstances he can feel no security for person or property.

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

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.

The sovereign, self-sufficient "individual" has always been a precarious basis upon which to anchor a left libertarian outlook.

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

Collective responsibility in revolutionary action... is a fundamental principle, which guides each one of us in our way of understanding the anarchist idea, in our determination that it should penetrate to the masses, in its spirit of sacrifice.

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

Every anarchist, as an anarchist, would be perfectly willing to surrender his own scheme directly, if he saw that another worked better.

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.

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.

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 state, therefore, is the most flagrant, the most cynical, and the most complete negation of humanity.

As early as World War I, American historians offered themselves to President Woodrow Wilson to carry out a task they called "historical engineering," by which they meant designing the facts of history so that they would serve state police.

Libertarian revolutionists should not continue to remain in isolation, when here is an opportunity to build a mass instrument for social struggle and a way to unify our libertarian forces on firm working class lines.

Instead of taking aim at some vague enemy, it's better wait a moment for him to turn into a friend.

I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject.

All that marching music doesn't concern me.

I regretted Mathillet's death because he was a prole like us, a slave of bourgeois society. It was his gesture that was fatal.

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.

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.

The most violent element in society is ignorance.

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.

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

Without the rule of one, there would be light, there would be truth, there would be justice. The rule of one is a crime.

Conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting... the truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.

The population of the world is gradually dividing into two classes, anarchists and criminals.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The state is nothing but this domination and this exploitation, well regulated and systematised.

I offered to stay awake to let the others go to sleep, and everyone laughed, saying that I would not even hear the cannon! But afterwards, one by one, they fell asleep, and I am watchful over all of them, while working for those who are to come.

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

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.

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.

Our cause cannot expect me to become a nun and the movement will not be turned into a cloister.

At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts.

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

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.

We should not put forward revolutionary action as a means of social reform, because that pretended means would simply be an appeal to force, to arbitrariness, in brief, a contradiction.

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

Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species.

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.

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.

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

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

Equality! I had always thought that it was the natural fruit of Liberty, which has no need of theory nor of constraint.

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