"Class is massively underrepresented in literature. Most books are written for the middle class, and generally they only have two modes of talking about the working class. The first is a kind of lofty contempt at the vulgarity, the stupidity of those people. The second is a kind of patronizing concern, which paints the working class as nothing but victims."
"Catholics and other Christians are against abortions and they're against homosexuals. Well who has less abortions than homosexuals?"
"There is no such thing as harmless power."
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
"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."
"The state is the most gigantic criminal extant. It manufactures criminals much faster than it punishes them."
"The authoritarian principle has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution."
"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."
"Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value."
"True, we have no conscription; that is, men are not usually forced to enlist in the army, but we have developed a far more exacting and rigid force - necessity."
"Today is the parent of tomorrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future."
"Ironically, the world idealized by primitivists would actually preclude the radical individualism celebrated by the individualist heirs of Max Stirner."
"Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions."
"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."
"Writers: express your rage against all iniquities during all your waking hours."
"To go towards freedom, it becomes necessary to develop our individuality."
"We need anarchists unencumbered by anarchism. Then, and only then, we can begin to get serious about fomenting anarchy."
"It's called the American Dream, 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it."
"To truly know freedom, one must develop the human being until one makes sure that no authority has the possibility of existing."
"When [the synthesis anarchist organization] develops itself fully (as happened in Spain in '36) it begins to dangerously resemble a party. Synthesis becomes control."
"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."
"Patriotism is the vice of nations."
"Free love? As if love is anything but free! Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere."
"Rights aren't rights if someone can take them away. They're privileges. That's all we've ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges."
"Like it or not, the future of life on this planet pivots on the future of society."
"Wheresoever it be, there will exist the power of certain men over others, and there will not be freedom, but there will be the oppression of one portion of mankind by another. Therefore power must be abolished."
"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."
"Revolution is indeed a violent process."
"The revolution will be the flowering of humanity as love is the flowering of the heart."
"Only the man who has successfully rid himself of the chains of oppression and seen all the horrors being perpetrated against the human race can be persuaded that his freedom and that of his neighbor are inviolable, as are their lives, and that his neighbor is his brother."
"For us, everything that seeks to destroy economic and political oppression, all that which serves to raise the moral and intellectual level of human beings, to give them the consciousness of their rights and of their forces and to persuade them to do their business by themselves, all that provokes hatred against oppression and love between people, brings us closer to our aim."
"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."
"Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it."
"The sovereign, self-sufficient "individual" has always been a precarious basis upon which to anchor a left libertarian outlook."
"A man won't steal, ordinarily, unless that which he steals is something he cannot as easily get without stealing; in liberty the cost of stealing would involve greater difficulties than producing, and consequently he would not be apt to steal."
"Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled utopian."
"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."
"The two principles referred to are authority and liberty, and the names of the two schools of socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or the other of them are, respectively, state socialism and anarchism."
"Naturally, any conqueror is going to play one group against another."
"Nobody believes or expects that the coming revolution, however formidable it should be, will realize unadulterated anarchist communism."
"Our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around."
"The anarchists never have claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow authority."
"I repeat that I am a political prisoner. The prosecution, whatever the attorney general may say, is political and nothing else."
"Side neither with nations nor with parties. Be neither Russians, Poles nor Slavs. Rather, be men who hunger for truth, free from any thoughts of particular interests, and from speculative ideas concerning the Chinese, Africans or Europeans. The patriot always ends up hating the foreigner, and loses the sense of justice that once kindled his enthusiasm."
"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."
"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."
"Everyone complains about politicians. Everyone says they suck. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky; they don't pass through a membrane from a separate reality. They come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, and American businesses. And they're elected by American voters. This is what our system produces, folks. This is the best we can do."
"Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a little slug of lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance."
"One thing only is needful: the knowledge of the simple and clear truth which finds place in every soul that is not stupefied by religious and scientific superstitions - the truth that for our life one law is valid - the law of love, which brings the highest happiness to every individual as well as to all mankind."
"What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence."
"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."
"We love to have agents provocateurs in the party, because they always propose the most revolutionary motions."
"One courageous act has sufficed to upset in a few days the entire governmental machinery, to make the colossus tremble."
"We don't have faith; we have absolutely no confidence in our success."
"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."
"Our authority is our own conscience. She is the one that pushes us, she is our spur. We are slaves, but to our duty."
"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 only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. The only thing that can console one for being rich is economy."
"Patriotism: a willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons."
"Cuba has probably been the target of more international terrorism than the rest of the world combined and, therefore, in the American ideological system it is regarded as the source of international terrorism, exactly as Orwell would have predicted."
"The Mexican people hate, by instinct, authority and the bourgeoisie."
"The point of public relations slogans like "Support Our Troops" is that they don't mean anything."
"If the existence of bullshit jobs seems to defy the logic of capitalism, one possible reason for their proliferation might be that the existing system isn't capitalism."
"To be good and lead a good life means to give to others more than one takes from them."
"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."
"When "voluntary association" is spoken of, voluntary adhesion to a plan, a project, a given action, this implies the possibility of refusing the association, adhesion or action."
"The individualist anarchist is never accountable to anyone but himself for his acts and gestures."
"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."
"Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place."
"It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep."
"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?"
"There are differences in the parties - I don't think they're great differences, but they're real, and small differences in a system of great power can have enormous consequences."
"The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Anarchism means all sort of things to different people, but the traditional anarchists' movements assumed that there'd be a highly organized society, just one organized from below with direct participation and so on."
"Liberty enters the field of journalism to speak for herself because she finds no one willing to speak for her."
"I have certain rules I live by. My first rule: I don't believe anything the government tells me."
"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."
"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."
"Consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation states are built on deficit spending. Debt has come to be the central issue of international politics. But nobody seems to know exactly what it is, or how to think about it."
"We do not doubt that, if the revolution broke out in several European countries, anarchists would suffer the same defeat because they are no less - if not even more so - divided on the plan of ideas and organization."
"Hate does not produce love; we will not renew the world by hate."
"You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious."
"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."
"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."
"If power is to be abolished it must be abolished not by force but by men's consciousness of its uselessness and evil."
"With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order."
"The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you."
"The police are making more anarchists than I could do in ten years."
"Post-leftist anarchists are striking off in many directions. Some may find the way - better yet, the ways - to a free future."
"Nor does [our kind of individualist] wish to have anything in common with those armchair Nietzcheans or weekend Stirnerites who imagine, poor wretches, that they are "affirming their individuality" by petty dishonesty in money matters, or by forcing themselves upon the companion of a friend in prison."
"In America, the president reigns for four years, and journalism governs for ever and ever."
"Anarchism was born in a moral revolt against social injustice."
"We need genuine democracy, the definition of which is "the people shall rule.""
"A corporate elite of managers and owners governs the economy and the political system."
"It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance" that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe."
"Our being is becoming, not stasis. Our science is utopia, our reality is eros, our desire is revolution."
"Dictatorship, the most extreme form of tyranny, can never lead to social liberation."
"It is especially in the domain of ethics that the dominating importance of the mutual aid principle appears in full."
"Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercize such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them."
"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."
"A libertarian is just a Republican who takes drugs."
"There are some whose nature it is to think and plead, and yield and yet return to the address, and so make headway in the minds of their fellowmen; and there are others who are stern and still, resolute, implacable as Judah's dream of God; - and those men strike - strike once and have ended. But the blow resounds across the world."
"Miss Goldman is a communist; I am an individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property, I wish to assert it."
"Go ahead, vote! Have faith in your delegates, believe in those you have voted for. But if you voted, don't complain."
"A different conception of society, very different from that which now prevails, is in process of formation."
"The social order of Spain ought to be overthrown; must be overthrown, will be overthrown; and Ferrer was doing a mighty work in that direction. The men who killed him knew and understood it well."
"The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism."
"As the uselessness and harmfulness of patriotism have become manifest, so also has increased the power of the government and ruling class to excite patriotism among the people."
"The enemy is very strong because, for centuries past, he has made his living from theft and violence: he has the accumulated experience of that, he has overcome internal crises and now he puts on a new face."
"As moderate as they were, as sensible as they proved themselves to be, the founders of the Circle turned out to be too advanced in the judgment of the guardians of moral order."
"All that's left to be done is that the workers take possession of the factory, the workshop, the mine, the foundry, the railroad, the ship, in a word, everything - that they recognize no bosses of any type."
"Always and everywhere among us, practical problems have been resolved by a majority of votes."
