Murray Bookchin Quotes

#1. We are asked to orient our "strategies" and "tactics" around poverty and material immiseration at a time when revolutionary sentiment is being generated by the banality of life under conditions of material abundance.

Murray Bookchin

#2. Nearly a half century ago, while Social-Democratic and Communist theoreticians babbled about a society with "work for all," the Dadaists, those magnificent madmen, demanded unemployment for everybody.

Murray Bookchin

#3. Until we become the architects of a society that is truly free and ecological, it will always seem that when the human brain is not adaptive, it is more often destructive than creative.

Murray Bookchin

#4. The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.

Murray Bookchin

#5. An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.

Murray Bookchin

#6. The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

Murray Bookchin

#7. Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.

Murray Bookchin

#8. Peter Kropotkin described Anarchism as the extreme left wing of socialism - a view with which I completely agree. One of my deepest concerns today is that the libertarian socialist core will be eroded by fashionable, post- modernist, spiritualist, mystic individualism.

Murray Bookchin

#9. I am puzzled by people today who, after moralizing about the need for cooperation and goodwill and love-thy-neighbor-as-thyself, suddenly invoke the most primitive, barbarous motivations for any kind of progress.

Murray Bookchin

#10. If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.

Murray Bookchin

#11. City planning finds its validation in the intuitive recognition that a burgeoning market society can not be trusted to produce spontaneously a habitable, sanitary, or even efficient city, much less a beautiful one.

Murray Bookchin

#12. There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.

Murray Bookchin

#13. Capitalism is a social cancer. It has always been a social cancer. It is the disease of society. It is the malignancy of society.

Murray Bookchin

#14. Too often, ideas meant to yield a certain practice are instead transported into the academy, as fare for 'enriching' a curriculum and, of course, generating jobs for the growing professoriat.

Murray Bookchin

#15. We must consciously create our own world, not according to mindless customs and destructive prejudices, but according to the canons of reason, reflection, and discourse that uniquely belong to our own species.

Murray Bookchin

#16. People are never free of trying to be content.

Murray Bookchin

#17. The truth, indeed, is out - but the ears to hear it and the minds to learn from it seem to have been atrophied by a cultivated ignorance and a nearly total loss of critical insight.

Murray Bookchin