"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."
"Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force."
"Common to all Anarchists is the desire to free society of all political and social coercive institutions which stand in the way of development of a free humanity."
"The Anarcho-Syndicalists know that wars are only waged in the interest of the ruling classes; they believe, therefore, that any means is justifiable that can prevent the organised murder of peoples."
"Just as you cannot see, at pleasure, with your ears and you cannot, at will, hear with your eyes so too you cannot make the state act in the interests of the working people. As an organ in the social body, its purpose is for the repression of self-determination."
"Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations and it is much, much louder than they care to remember."
"Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes."
"The urge for social justice can only develop properly and be effective when it grows out of man's sense of personal freedom and is based on that. In other words Socialism will be free or it will not be at all."
"One who is constantly striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a machine himself and loses all human feeling."
"Authority, when first detecting chaos at its heels, will entertain the vilest schemes to save its orderly facade."
"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.""
"Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace."
"I can't see coherent political structures in the traditional sense lasting beyond the next twenty years, I don't think that would be possible."
"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."
"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."
"Fascism becomes less and less possible. We have to accept that we are moving towards some sort of anarchy."
"The peoples owe all the political rights and privileges which we enjoy today in greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength."
"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."
"Things tend to organise themselves. If there is any message from contemporary science, it is surely that."
"Sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust."
"Whereas we anarchists desire the extinction of the state through the social revolution and the constitution of an autonomist federal order, the Leninists desire the destruction of the bourgeois state and moreover the conquest of the state by the "proletariat.""
"The view which sees in every capitalist only a profit machine may very well meet the demands of propaganda, but it is conceived much too narrowly and does not correspond to reality."
"Capitalism and communism felt like they were always going to be around, but it turns out they were just two ways of ordering an industrial society. If you were looking for more fundamental human political poles, you'd take anarchy and fascism, for my money."
"Organization is, after all, only a means to an end. When it becomes an end in itself, it kills the spirit and the vital initiative of its members and sets up that domination by mediocrity which is the characteristic of all bureaucracies."
"You anarchist ministers, you make eloquent speeches and you write brilliant articles, but it is not with speeches and articles that one wins the war and defends the revolution."
"Leninism constitutes, without any doubt, a return to the revolutionary spirit of Marxism, but it also constitutes a return to the fallacies and abstractions of Marxist metaphysics."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"Admittedly, I do have several bones - whole war fields full of bones, in fact - to pick with organised religion of whatever stripe."
"The growth of technology at the expense of human personality, and especially the fatalistic submission with which the great majority surrender to this condition, is the reason why the desire for freedom is less alive among men today and has with many of them given place completely to a desire for economic security."
"I am an anarchist not because I believe anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal."
"There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money."
"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 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."
"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."
"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 Bolshevik government revealed itself to be powerless in the face of a bureaucracy which is super-abundant, parasitic, despotic and dishonest."
"For the machine, because of the way it is built, can work only in a given direction, no matter who pulls its levers."
"One can lose one's illusions about everything and about everyone, but not about what one affirms with one's moral conscience."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"We need genuine democracy, the definition of which is "the people shall rule.""
"Dictatorship, the most extreme form of tyranny, can never lead to social liberation."
