Pyotr Kropotkin Quotes

#1. Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state.

Pyotr Kropotkin

#2. variety is life; uniformity is death

Pyotr Kropotkin

#3. When one has talent, everything contributes to its development.

Pyotr Kropotkin

#4. In fact, we know full well today that it is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists.

Pyotr Kropotkin

#5. Men passionately desire to live after death, but they often pass away without noticing the fact that the memory of a really good person always lives. It is impressed upon the next generation, and is transmitted again to the children. Is that not an immortality worth striving for?

Pyotr Kropotkin

#6. Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none.

Pyotr Kropotkin

#7. He objected, though, to indiscriminate reading. 'One must have some question,' he wrote, 'addressed to the book one is going to read.

Pyotr Kropotkin

#8. I understand regicide as a means of obtaining vengeance for the ruin of our lives, but regicide as a means of obtaining political freedom I could never understand.

Pyotr Kropotkin

#9. It is in the ardent revolutionist to whom the joys of art, of science, even of family life, seem bitter, so long as they cannot be shared by all, and who works despite misery and persecution for the regeneration of the world.

Pyotr Kropotkin

#10. Throughout the history of our civilisation, two traditions, two opposed tendencies, have been in conflict: the Roman tradition and the popular tradition, the imperial tradition and the federalist tradition, the authoritarian tradition and the libertarian tradition.

Pyotr Kropotkin

#11. Do not the bewitching power of all studies lie in that they continually open up to us new, unsuspected horizons, not yet understood, which entice us to proceed further and further in the penetration of what appears at first sight only in vague outline?

Pyotr Kropotkin

#12. The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.

Pyotr Kropotkin

#13. Be strong. Overflow with emotional and intellectual energy, and you will spread your intelligence, your love, your energy of action broadcast among others! This is what all moral teaching comes to.

Pyotr Kropotkin

#14. My brother could not write about trifles. Even in society he became animated only when some serious discussion was engaged in, and he complained of feeling 'a dull pain in the brain'
a physical pain, as he used to say
when he was with people who cared only for small talk.

Pyotr Kropotkin

#15. It is not difficult, indeed, to see the absurdity of naming a few men and saying to them, "Make laws regulating all our spheres of activity, although not one of you knows anything about them!

Pyotr Kropotkin

#16. It is only those who do nothing who makes no mistake.

Pyotr Kropotkin

#17. And by that habit of submission, with which we are only too familiar, the thought of the next generation retains this religious twist, which is at once servile and authoritative; for authority and servility walk ever hand in hand.

Pyotr Kropotkin