ANaRChIsTiC QUoTeS
THESE ARE EITHER QUOTES FROM ANARCHIST THEORISTS, OR ARE ANARCHISTIC IN NATURE AND CONTENT, AND ARE THUS INCLUDED TO GIVE THE READER A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT WERE ABOUT.
An apt and true reply was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride. "What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor."
St. Augustine
The City of God I am a free prince and have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a hundred sail of ships and an army of a hundred thousand men in the field. And this my conscience tells me; that there is no arguing with such sniveling puppies who allow superiors to kick them about the deck at pleasure, and pin their faith upon the pimp of a parson, a squab who neither practices nor believes what he puts upon the chuckle-headed fools he preaches to.
Black Sam Bellamy
pirate captain Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations A democracy cannot be both ignorant and free.
Thomas Jefferson
When people fear the government, there is tyranny. When government fears the people, there is liberty.
Thomas Paine
Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion.
William Blake
The great are great only because we are on our knees. Let us rise!
Max Stirner
The Ego and His Own The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.
Mikhail Bakunin
God and the State In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense majority in subjection to them.
Mikhail Bakunin
God and the State If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.
Mikhail Bakunin
God and the State No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker.
Mikhail Bakunin
It clearly follows that to make men moral it is necessary to make their social environment moral. And that can be done in only one way; by assuring the triumph of justice, that is, the complete liberty of everyone in the most perfect equality for all. Inequality of conditions and rights, and the resulting lack of liberty for all, is the great collective iniquity begetting all individual iniquities.
Mikhail Bakunin
Man does not become man, nor does he achieve awareness or realization of his humanity, other than in society and in the collective movement of the whole society; he only shakes off the yoke of internal nature through collective or social labor...and without his material emancipation there can be no intellectual or moral emancipation for anyone...man in isolation can have no awareness of his liberty. Being free for man means being acknowledged, considered and treated as such by another man, and by all the men around him. Liberty is therefore a feature not of isolation but of interaction, not of exclusion but rather of connection...I myself am human and free only to the extent that I acknowledge the humanity and liberty of all my fellows... I am properly free when all the men and women about me are equally free. Far from being a limitation or a denial of my liberty, the liberty of another is its necessary condition and confirmation.
Mikhail Bakunin
Slavery may change its form or its name--its essence remains the same. Its essence may be expressed in these words: to be a slave is to be forced to work for someone else, just as to be a master is to live on someone else's work. In antiquity...slaves were, in all honesty, called slaves. In the Middle Ages, they took the name of serfs; nowadays, they are called wage earners.
Mikhail Bakunin
Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society private property is already done away for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its nonexistence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the nonexistence of property for the immense majority of society.
Karl Marx
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor. --Oscar Wilde I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Any revolutionary agitation exacts enormous sacrifices, not so much in terms of prison sentences and years of incarceration - which have been raining down by the hundreds of years annually - as in terms of the manifold personal sacrifices sustained by those who commit themselves to revolutionary agitation.
Peter Kropotkin
Memoirs of a Revolutionist I read the Social Democratic newspapers, I saw their disgusting attitude towards anything that bore even the slightest revolutionary character, and I realized that there could be no reconciliation between a revolutionary party and a party trying to earn a reputation for 'moderation' in the eyes of the government and the bourgeoisie.
Peter Kropotkin
Memoirs of a Revolutionist It is often said that anarchists live in a world of dreams to come and do not see the things which happen today. We see them only too well, and in their true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forests of prejudices that beset us. --Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal Anyone in a free society where the laws are unjust has an obligation to break the law.
Henry David Thoreau
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves. --Henry David Thoreau, 1847 Individualism is, in theory, a kind of Anarchy without cooperation. It is therefore no better than a lie, because liberty is not possible without Solidarity, without cooperation. The criticism which Individualists pass on government is merely the wish to deprive it of certain functions, to hand them over virtually to the capitalists. But it cannot attack those repressive functions which form the essence of government, for without an armed force the propietary system could not be upheld.
Errico Malatesta
Anarchy Anarchists are opposed to violence; everyone knows that. The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. It is life based on freedom of the individual, without the intervention of the gendarme. For this reason we are the enemies of capitalism which depends on the protection of the gendarme to oblige workers to allow themselves to be exploited--or even to remain idle and go hungry when it is not in the interest of the bosses to exploit them. We are therefore enemies of the State which is the coercive violent organization of society.
Errico Malatesta
You ask me why the IWW is not patriotic to the United States. If you were a bum without a blanket; if you had left your wife and kids when you went west for a job, and had never located them since; if your job had never kept you long enough in a place to qualify to vote; if you slept in a lousy, sour bunkhouse, and ate food just as rotten as they could give you and get by with it; if deputy sheriffs shot your cooking cans full of holes and spilled your grub on the ground; if your wages were lowered on you when the bosses thought they had you down...if every person who represented law and order and the nation beat you up, railroaded you to jail, and the good Christian people cheered and told them to go to it, how in hell do you expect a man to be patriotic? This war is a businessman's war and we don't see why we should go out and get shot in order to save the lovely state of affairs that we now enjoy. --Big Bill Haywood For every dollar the boss has and didn't work for, one of us worked for a dollar and didn't get it.
Big Bill Haywood
I am an anarchist! Wherefore I will not rule and also ruled I will not be.
John Henry Mackay
Progress in thought is the assertion of individualism against authority.
Oscar Wilde
Anarchism...stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral.
Emma Goldman
The political arena leaves one no alternatives, one must be either a dunce or a rogue. --Emma Goldman Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both recreation and hope.
Emma Goldman
Individuality is not to be confused with the various ideas and concepts of Individualism; much less with that 'rugged individualism' which is only a masked attempt to repress and defeat the individual and his individuality. So-called Individualism is the social and economic laissez-faire: the exploitation of the masses by means of legal trickery, spiritual debasement and systematic indoctrination of the servile spirit.... That corrupt and perverse 'individualism' is the strait jacket of individuality. It has converted life into a degrading race for externals, for possession, for social prestige and supremacy. Its highest wisdom is 'the devil take the hindmost.'
Emma Goldman
'Rugged individualism' has meant all the 'individualism' for the masters, while the people are regimented into a slave caste to serve a handful of self-seeking 'supermen.' America is perhaps the best representative of this kind of individualism, in whose name political tyranny and social oppression are defended and held up as virtues; while every aspiration and attempt of man to gain freedom and social opportunity to live is denounced as 'un-American' and evil in the name of that same individuality.
Emma Goldman
We are all still barbarians who resort to force and violence to settle our doubts, difficulties and troubles. Violence is the method of ignorance, the weapon of the weak. The strong of heart and brain need no violence, for they are irresistable in their consciousness of being right.
Alexander Berkman
There is no "pure" Anarchism. There is only the application of Anarchist principles to the realities of social living. The aim of Anarchism is to stimulate forces that propel society in a libertarian direction.
Sam Dolgoff
The Relevance of Anarchism to Modern Society When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
Dom Helder Camara
Archbishop of Recife Put it to you this way, since you're a straight John Doe who pays his taxes and obeys the Constitution and all that bullshit, not like us illegal motherfuckers-there's people taking you for your livelihood every day and lying to you about it to your face, dog! Highway robbers in suits and government gangsters using your money to kill Gs like me worldwide! And then somebody gonna act like I'm a little maggot for taking what I need to help my mom 'cause she doesn't have a fuckin' gold card? Shiiit... --Smoke, a bicycle thief, from New City Every great advance in....knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
Julian Huxley
Lay Sermons But he who has no confidence in the creative capacity of the masses and in their capability to revolt doesn't belong in the revolutionary movement. He should go to a monastery and get on his knees and start praying. Because he is no revolutionist. He is a son of a bitch.
Sam Dolgoff
Workers and their families may starve to death in the New World Order of economic rationality, but diamond necklaces are cheaper in elegant New York shops, thanks to the miracle of the market.
Noam Chomsky
For the past several hundred years, elite democratic theory has tended to range within a narrow spectrum. At one extreme, we have the libertarian thinker John Locke, who held that citizens have no right to discuss public affairs, though they may know about them.... At the other extreme we have statist reactionaries of the Reaganite variety ('conservatives'), who reject the right of the public to even know what their leaders are doing and therefore establish illegal state propaganda agencies, favor large-scale clandestine operations, block release of information about the government even from the distant past, and in other ways protect state power from scrutiny.
Noam Chomsky
Long before Lenin and Trotsky took power, the threat of 'Communism' and 'anarchism' had been regularly invoked by the business-government-press complex to justify the violent suppression of attempts by working people to organize and to gain elementary rights.
Noam Chomsky
Freedom is the precondition for aquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is reached.
Kant
(Quoted by Noam Chomsky) In the hands of a people whose education has been willfully neglected, the ballot is a cunning swindle benefitting only the united barons of industry, trade and property.
Daniel Guérin
Capitalism can no more be 'persuaded' to limit growth than a human being can be 'persuaded' to stop breathing. Attempts to 'green' capitalism, to make it 'ecological', are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.
Murray Bookchin