Anarchy Quotes

"Anarchism does not mean bloodshed; it does not mean robbery, arson, etc. These monstrosities are, on the contrary, the characteristic features of capitalism. Anarchism means peace and tranquility to all." --August Spies, Haymarket anarchist

"If we have to use force, it is because we are America." --Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

I will never apologize for the United States of America -- I don't care what the facts are. --George Bush (senior), commenting on the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the U.S. warship Vincennes, killing 290 passengers. Quoted in Newsweek, August 15, 1989


"We are going to inherit the earth . There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie may blast and burn its own world before it finally leaves the stage of history. We Are not afraid of ruins. We who ploughed the prairies and built the cities can build again, only better next time. We carry a new world, here in our hearts. That world is growing this minute." ----Durruti

"The star of revolution will rise high above the streets of Moscow, from a sea of blood and fire, and turn into a lodestar to lead a liberated humanity" -Mikhail Bakunin

You can't mine coal without machine guns. --Richard B. Mellon, Congressional testimony quoted in Time, June 14, 1937

"The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing - to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. " - John Keats

"'What I believe' is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect." - Emma Goldman

"The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of another's labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live" -Leo Tolstoy

"Man must not check reason by tradition, but contrawise, must check tradition by reason." -Leo Tolstoy<

"In proportion as the atagonism between the classes vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end" -Marx/Engels

"Juridically they are both equal [the worker and capitalist]; but economically the worker is the serf of the capitalist . . . thereby the worker sells his person and his liberty for a given time. The worker is in the position of a serf because this terrible threat of starvation which daily hangs over his head and over his family, will force him to accept any conditions imposed by the gainful calculations of the capitalist, the industrialist, the employer. . . .The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to do so? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forces him to sell himself to the first employer. Thus the worker's liberty . . . is only a theoretical freedom, lacking any means for its possible realisation, and consequently it is only a fictitious liberty, an utter falsehood. The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom -- voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory from an economic sense -- broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery." -Bakunin

A democracy cannot be both ignorant and free. --Thomas Jefferson

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

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

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

I am an anarchist! Wherefore I will not rule and also ruled I will not be. --John Henry Mackay

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

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

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

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

The poor object to being governed badly, while the rich object to being governed at all. G. K. Chesterton

For every complex problem there is a solution which is straightforward, simple, and wrong. H. L. Mencken

'Tis better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. Anonymous

Only after the last tree has been cut down,
only after the last river has been poisoned,
only after the last fish has been caught,
only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten. --The Cree People