Emma Goldman Quotes

#1. The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings as in his native land.

Emma Goldman

#2. I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.

Emma Goldman

#3. Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage. Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.

Emma Goldman

#4. What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!

Emma Goldman

#5. Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion and liberation of the human body from the coercion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. It stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals ...

Emma Goldman

#6. What is generally regarded as success - acquisition of wealth, the capture of power or social prestige - I consider the most dismal failures. I hold when it is said of a man that he has arrived, it means that he is finished - his development has stopped at that point.

Emma Goldman

#7. Predigested food' should be inscribed over every hall of learning as a warning to all who do not wish to lose their own personalities and their original sense of judgment ...

Emma Goldman

#8. The State, every government whatever its form, character or color - be it absolute or constitutional, monarchy or republic, Fascist, Nazi or bolshevik - is by its very nature conservative, static, intolerant of change and opposed to it.

Emma Goldman

#9. Those who sit in a glass house do wrong to throw stones about them; besides, the American glass house is rather thin, it will break easily, and the interior is anything but a gainly sight.

Emma Goldman

#10. Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.

Emma Goldman

#11. Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one

Emma Goldman

#12. Revolution is indeed a violent process. But if it is to result only in a change of dictatorship, in a shifting of names and political personalities, then it is hardly worth while.

Emma Goldman

#13. There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can't be.

Emma Goldman

#14. The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass.

Emma Goldman

#15. Peter Kropotkin ... was recognized by friend and foe as one of the greatest minds ... of the nineteenth century ... The lucidity and brilliance of his mind combined with his warm-heartednes s into the harmonious whole of a fascinating and gracious personality.

Emma Goldman

#16. I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.

Emma Goldman

#17. If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.

Emma Goldman

#18. Give us what belongs to us in peace, and if you don't give it to us in peace, we will take it by force.

Emma Goldman

#19. Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society.

Emma Goldman

#20. With the conception that the Revolution was only a means of securing political power, it was inevitable that all revolutionary values should be subordinated to the needs of the Socialist State; indeed, exploited to further the security of the newly acquired governmental power.

Emma Goldman

#21. What will you do with the lazy ones, who would not work?'
No one is lazy. They grow hopeless from the misery of their present existence, and give up. Under our order of things, every men would do the work he liked, and would have as much as his neighbor, so could not be unhappy and discouraged.

Emma Goldman

#22. Jealousy is the very reverse of understanding, of sympathy, and of generous feeling. Never has jealousy added to character, never does it make the individual big and fine.

Emma Goldman

#23. Even were the workers able to have their own representatives, for which our good Socialist politicians are clamoring, what chances are there for their honesty and good faith?

Emma Goldman

#24. Democracy must first be safe for America before it can be safe for the world.

Emma Goldman

#25. On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.

Emma Goldman

#26. Anarchism rouses man to rebellion against this black monster. Break your mental fetters, says Anarchism to man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress.

Emma Goldman

#27. The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather understand one another.

Emma Goldman

#28. All claims of education notwithstanding, the pupil will accept only that which his mind craves.

Emma Goldman

#29. As to a thorough eradication of prostitution, nothing can accomplish that save a complete transvaluation of all accepted values
especially the moral ones
coupled with the abolition of industrial slavery.

Emma Goldman

#30. 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

#31. The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.

Emma Goldman

#32. It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.

Emma Goldman

#33. All unnatural unions which are not hallowed by love are prostitution.

Emma Goldman

#34. What's wrong with lust? You fancy your neighbor's husband so what are you supposed to do? Poke your eyes out so that you can't see him anymore? Acting on it is maybe a sin ... but my God, just lusting after someone? Is that so bad?

Emma Goldman

#35. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between two walls.

Emma Goldman

#36. Politicians promise you heaven before election and give you hell after

Emma Goldman

#37. Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only 'order' that governments have ever maintained.

Emma Goldman

#38. Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested - for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day.

Emma Goldman

#39. The majority represent a mass of cowards, willing to accept him who mirror its own soul and mind poverty.

Emma Goldman

#40. It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.

Emma Goldman

#41. The persecution of the innovator and protestant has always been inspired by fear on the part of constituted authority of having its infallibility questioned and its power undermined.

Emma Goldman

#42. To call the State an organism shows a diseased tendency to make a fetish of words.

Emma Goldman

#43. The history of human growth is at the same time the history of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn, and the brighter dawn has always been considered illegal, outside of the law.

Emma Goldman

#44. The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals.

Emma Goldman

#45. Mother Liberty caresses with generous affections ... [those] who, armed with the weapons of high-minded honesty, ... have grasped that the freedom of each is rooted in the freedom of all.

Emma Goldman

#46. The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief ... So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies.

Emma Goldman

#47. The spirit of militarism has already permeated all walks of life. Indeed, I am convinced that militarism is a greater danger here than anywhere else, because of the many bribes capitalism holds out to those whom it wishes to destroy.

Emma Goldman

#48. Every society has the criminals it deserves.

Emma Goldman

#49. If I can not dance, I want no part in your revolution.

Emma Goldman

#50. Love is it's own protection.

Emma Goldman

#51. The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that from early infancy the mind of the child is provided with blood-curdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc.

Emma Goldman

#52. A true conception of the relation of the sexes will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows of but one great thing; to give of one's self boundlessly, in order to find one's self richer, deeper, better.

Emma Goldman

#53. Woman does not see what people of intellect perceived fifty years ago: that suffrage is an evil, that it has only helped to enslave people, that it has but closed their eyes that they may not see how craftily they were made to submit.

Emma Goldman

#54. If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.

Emma Goldman

#55. To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.

Emma Goldman

#56. From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed toward that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that.

Emma Goldman

#57. Wealth means power: the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade.

Emma Goldman

#58. Life without an ideal is spiritual death.

Emma Goldman

#59. Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.

Emma Goldman

#60. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.

Emma Goldman

#61. Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race.

Emma Goldman

#62. When in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.

Emma Goldman

#63. Understand one another.

Emma Goldman

#64. No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness, and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.

Emma Goldman

#65. Leo Tolstoy ... defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.

Emma Goldman

#66. Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.

Emma Goldman

#67. Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.

Emma Goldman

#68. The individual and social instincts, - the one a most potent factor for individual endeavor, for growth, aspiration, self-realization; the other an equally potent factor for mutual helpfulness and social well-being.

Emma Goldman

#69. If the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but itcan not do without that life.

Emma Goldman

#70. The majority cares little for ideals and integrity. What it craves is display.

Emma Goldman

#71. No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.

Emma Goldman

#72. The modern drama, operating through the double channel of dramatist and interpreter, affecting as it does both mind and heart,is the strongest force in developing social discontent, swelling the powerful tide of unrest that sweeps onward and over the dam of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition.

Emma Goldman

#73. Salvation lies in an energetic march onward towards a brighter and clearer future.

Emma Goldman

#74. The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved.

Emma Goldman

#75. The function of militarism is to kill. It cannot live except through murder.

Emma Goldman

#76. "All government in essence," says Emerson, "is tyranny." It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual.

Emma Goldman

#77. True, the movement for women's rights has broken many old fetters, but it has also forged new ones.

Emma Goldman

#78. The triumph of the philosophy of Atheism is to free man from the nightmare of gods; it means the dissolution of the phantoms of the beyond.

Emma Goldman

#79. A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.

Emma Goldman

#80. It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice, which drives the political offender to act.

Emma Goldman

#81. The State is a term for the legislative and administrative machinery whereby certain business of the people is transacted, and badly so.

Emma Goldman

#82. Corruption of politics has nothing to do with the morals, or the laxity of morals, of various political personalities. Its cause is altogether a material one.

Emma Goldman

#83. Statutory regulations, legislative enactments, constitutional provisions, are invasive. They never yet induced man to do anything he could and would not do by virtue of his intellect or temperament, nor prevented anything that man was impelled to do by the same dictates.

Emma Goldman

#84. The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.

Emma Goldman

#85. Idealists foolish enough to throw caution to the winds have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.

Emma Goldman

#86. The American suffrage movement has been, until very recently, altogether a parlor affair, absolutely detached from the economic needs of the people.

Emma Goldman

#87. 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.

Emma Goldman

#88. Pettiness separates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big.

Emma Goldman

#89. Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.

Emma Goldman

#90. The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism.

Emma Goldman

#91. If society were only relieved of the waste and expense of keeping a lazy class, and the equally great expense of the paraphernalia of protection this lazy class requires, the social tables would contain an abundance for all, including even the occasional lazy individual.

Emma Goldman

#92. I believe - indeed, I know - that whatever is fine and beautiful in the human expresses and asserts itself in spite of government, and not because of it.

Emma Goldman

#93. So few people realize that preparedness never leads to peace, but that it is indeed the road to universal slaughter.

Emma Goldman

#94. It is organized violence on the top which creates individual violence at the bottom

Emma Goldman

#95. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth.

Emma Goldman

#96. The most violent element in society is ignorance.

Emma Goldman

#97. How to raise this dead level of theistic belief is really a matter of life and death for all denominations. Therefore their tolerance; but it is a tolerance not of understanding; but of weakness.

Emma Goldman

#98. People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.

Emma Goldman

#99. Success achieved by the most contemptible means cannot but destroy the soul ... It helps to cover up the inner corruption and gradually dulls one's scruples, so that those who begin with some high ambition cannot, even if they would, create anything out of themselves.

Emma Goldman

#100. There are, however, some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and Bigotry - the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth.

Emma Goldman