Rudolf Rocker Quotes

#1. Asceticism in most cases is either the result of a sordid imagination or of passion diverted from its natural course, and experience has shown that when the protection of public morals is entrusted to its votaries, the consequences are usually appalling.

Rudolf Rocker

#2. Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force.

Rudolf Rocker

#3. Anarchism has a broad back, like paper it endures anything,

Rudolf Rocker

#4. For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility of every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities and talents with which nature has endowed them, and turn them to social account.

Rudolf Rocker

#5. I am an Anarchist not because I believe Anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal.

Rudolf Rocker

#6. For the machine, because of the way it is built, can work only in a given direction, no matter who pulls its levers.

Rudolf Rocker

#7. The nation which can only be saved by one man and wants to be saved that way deserves a whipping!

Rudolf Rocker

#8. One compels respect from others when he knows how to defend his dignity as a human being.

Rudolf Rocker

#9. Just as you cannot see, at pleasure, with your ears and you cannot, at will, hear with your eyes so too you cannot make the state act in the interests of the working people. As an organ in the social body, its purpose is for the repression of self-determination.

Rudolf Rocker

#10. Modern Anarcho-Syndicalism is a direct continuation of those social aspirations which took shape in the bosom of the First International and which were best understood and most strongly held by the libertarian wing of the great workers' alliance.

Rudolf Rocker

#11. The ever-growing power of a soulless political bureaucracy which supervises and safeguards the life of man from the cradle to the grave is putting ever-greater obstacles in the way of co-operation among human beings.

Rudolf Rocker