Top 47 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Quotes
#2. If one were to ask ... "What is slavery?" and I should answer in one word, "murder," my meaning would be understood at once. Why, then, to this other question: "What is property?" may I not likewise answer, "theft" ... ?
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#3. Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#4. All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in the words: agricultural-industrial federation. All my political ideas boil down to a similar formula: political federation or decentralization.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#5. All men in their hearts, I say, bear witness to these truths; they need only to be made to understand it.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#7. All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#8. ANARCHY, or the government of each man by himself or as the English say, self -government.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#9. AXIOM. - Property is the Right of Increase claimed by the Proprietor over any thing which he has stamped as his own.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#11. We want property, but property restored to its proper limits, that is to say, free distribution of the products of labour, property minus usury!
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#13. As soon as I set foot in the parliamentary Sinai, I ceased to be in touch with the masses.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#14. In any given society the authority of man over man runs in inverse proportion to the intellectual development of that society.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#16. Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#19. Every State which breaks the equilibrium in its own favor only causes the other States to combine against it, and thereby diminishes its influence and power.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#22. The notion of anarchy ... means that once industrial functions have taken over from political functions, then business transactions and exchange alone produce the social order.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#23. It is through separation that you will win: no representatives, and no candidates!
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#24. Justice is a faculty that may be developed. This development is what constitutes the education of the human race.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#25. My hatred of privilege and human authority was unbounded; perhaps at times I have been guilty, in my indignation, of confounding persons and things; at present I can only despise and complain; to cease to hate I only needed to know.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#26. A common danger tends to concord. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In Communism, inequality comes from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#29. The social revolution is seriously compromised if it comes through a political revolution.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#31. Communism
the first expression of the social nature
is the first term of social development
the thesis; property, the reverse of communism, is the second term
the antithesis. When we have discovered the third term, the synthesis, we shall have the required solution.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#33. The proprietor, producing neither by his own labor nor by his implement, and receiving products in exchange for nothing, is either a parasite or a thief.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#34. Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#35. Anarchy is ... a form of government or constitution in which public and private consciousness , formed through the development of science and law , is alone sufficient to maintain order and guarantee all liberties.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#36. I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#37. The idea of God is the type and foundation of the principle of authority and absolutism, which it is our task to destroy or at least to subordinate wherever it manifests itself.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#38. Producer and consumer are always one and the same person, merely considered from two different viewpoints.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#39. Democracy is nothing but the Tyranny of Majorities, the most abominable tyranny of all, for it is not based on the authority of a religion, not upon the nobility of a race, not on the merits of talents and of riches. It merely rests upon numbers and hides behind the name of the people.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#40. On the one hand, the falsest judgments, whether based on isolated facts or only on appearances, always embrace some truths whose sphere, whether large or small, affords room for a certain number of inferences, beyond which we fall into absurdity.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#41. It is better to enlighten men's minds than to teach them to be obstinate in their prejudices.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#42. Communism is a society where each one works according to his abilities and gets according to his needs.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#47. The faults of which we ask you [God] the remittance, it is you who make us commit them; the traps of which we implore you to deliver us, it is you who has set them for us; and the Satan which surrounds us, this Satan, it is you.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
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