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

Writers: express your rage against all iniquities during all your waking hours.

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

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.

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.

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.

May the enemies of the people be terrified at the unexpected awakening.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We must ask in a manly and proud posture and not beg on our knees.

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

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.

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercize it, and degrades those over whom it is exercized.

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.

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.

The deeper we trace the political influences in history, the more are we convinced that the "will to power" has up to now been one of the strongest motives in the development of human social forms.

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.

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.

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.

A government that shall punish all vices impartially is so obviously an impossibility, that nobody was ever found, or ever will be found, foolish enough to propose it.

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.

If there is going to be real class unity or solidarity, there is no way forward for white anarchists, socialists, or autonomous people of color except to recognize the necessity of organizing movements based on new conceptions of class and race.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

When we have undermined the patriotic lie, we shall have cleared the path for the great structure where all shall be united into a universal brotherhood - a truly free society.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

It's one thing to say, "Another world is possible." It's another to experience it, however momentarily.

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.

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 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.

Freedoms are not given, they are taken.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Anarchism was born in a moral revolt against social injustice.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I stand ready to negotiate, but I want no part of laws: I acknowledge none.

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

Man, according to the diverse conditions in which he moves, is more or less worthy or unworthy. The more he has a sense of his liberty, the more he also has a feeling of his dignity; the more respect he has for himself, and also for his fellows.

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

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.

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 nature of a species can be changed completely as a result of the modifications resulting from the passage through a series of environments.

Today is the parent of tomorrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future.

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

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

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!

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

Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.

We’re not depressed; we’re on strike. For those who refuse to manage themselves, “depression” is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a sidestep towards a political disaffiliation.

If cost is made the limit of price, everyone becomes interested in reducing cost, by bringing in all the economies, all the facilities to their aid. But, on the contrary, if cost does not govern the price, but every thing is priced at what it will bring, there are no such cooperating interests.

I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.

The old motives of profit and self-interest will cease to dominate economic life. Instead the incentive will be the good of the members of society, without distinction.

We have confirmed something we only knew in theory, namely that revolution, in which uncontrolled and uncontrollable forces operate imperiously, is blind and destructive, grandiose and cruel.

In the United States, the New Left has agreed to regard itself as Marxist and speaks of seizing power and building socialism, although it is strongly opposed to centralized power and it has no economic theory whatever for a society and technology like ours.

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

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

Authority is something from which we are constantly subtracting, of which there remains always a residue, and which we attempt to make smaller and smaller.

Responsibility must be individual, or there is no responsibility at all.

When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick."

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

If there be in nature such a principle as justice, it is necessarily the only political principle there ever was, or ever will be.

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

Freedoms are not given, they are taken.

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.

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

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.

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.

There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.

Resignation is death. Revolt is life.

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

Emancipation or non-emancipation of woman, emancipation or non-emancipation of man - what does it mean? Is it that by nature one has rights and the other has no rights?

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.

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.

Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate domination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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