Top 100 Anarchism's Quotes
#1. Anarchism's lone objective is to reach a point at which the belligerence of some humans against humanity, in whatever form, comes to a halt.
Gustav Landauer
#2. Cleansed of its leftist residues, anarchy - anarchism minus Marxism - will be free to get better at being what it is.
Bob Black
#4. A thorough investigation would prove that nine crimes out of ten could be traced, directly or indirectly, to our economic and social iniquities, to our system of remorseless exploitation and robbery.
Emma Goldman
#5. Within a diverse swarm of individuals and small groups, resistance can be anywhere and anything; everywhere and all the time.
Curious George Brigade
#6. Every society has the criminals it deserves.
Emma Goldman
#7. Not only my arrest but the others smack of the Haymarket. The police are very much in disrepute all over the country, and they wish to do something to clear themselves. They are trying to make it an anarchist plot. If they wish to make up a case, they may succeed.
Emma Goldman
#8. Only those prepared to go too far will learn how far they can go.
CrimethInc.
#9. Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, "Freedom." Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully." - Lucy Parsons
Lucy Parsons
#11. Plantie is a very strong Protestant, that is to say, he's against all churches, especially the Protestant: and he thinks a lot of Buddha, Karma and Confucius. He is also a bit of an anarchist and three or four years ago he took up Einstein and vitamins.
Joyce Cary
#12. Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.
Jean Baudrillard
#13. We have been expropriated from our own language by television, from our songs by reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornography, from our city by the police and from our friends by wage-labor.
The Invisible Committee
#14. 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
#15. There is a saying, if any stranger enquire of the first met of Maan, were it even a child, "Who is here the sheykh?" he would answer him "I am he.
Charles M. Doughty
#16. Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes.
Alan Moore
#17. I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.
Robert Anton Wilson
#18. What is common becomes sense, but what is sensible doesn't always become common.
CrimethInc.
#19. Whenever freedom is made into the absolute, the result is not freedom but anarchism. Freedom must be under law, or it is not freedom.
R.J. Rushdoony
#20. Anarchism or freedom is the aim, while the state and dictatorship is the means, and so, in order to free the masses, they have first to be enslaved.
Mikhail Bakunin
#21. Private enterprise manages better all that to which it is equal. Anarchism declares that private enterprise, whether individual or cooperative, is equal to all the undertakings of society.
Voltairine De Cleyre
#22. The rejection of mass organizations as the be-all, end-all of organizing is vital for the creation and rediscovery of possibilities for empowerment and effective anarchistic work.
Curious George Brigade
#23. Anarchism does not mean bloodshed; it does not mean robbery, arson, etc. These monstrosities are, on the contrary, the characteristic features of capitalism. Anarchism means peace and tranquility to all.
August Spies
#24. People will think you brilliant
only if you tell them what they know.
To avoid being thought brilliant,
avoid knowing what they know.
Write to discover to yourself
what you know.
Anarchism is Not Enough
Laura Riding Jackson
#25. One does not suffer nearly so much from one's inadequacies as from one's unused abilities.
CrimethInc.
#26. If you say that you reject violence when it exceeds the limits imposed by the needs of defense, they accuse you of pacifism, without understanding that violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism, just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism.
Errico Malatesta
#27. It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself.
Andre Breton
#28. Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
Ivan Illich
#29. It is better to enlighten men's minds than to teach them to be obstinate in their prejudices.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#30. For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville's day, not the passion for egalitarianism but an individualist, that is anti-authoritarian, antinomian though curiously legalistic anarchism, has become the core of the value system in the USA.
Eric Hobsbawm
#32. Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.
Alan Moore
#33. No genuine revolutionary challenge to either the State or Capitalism in the United States can fail to ignore racism's importance in maintaining the current system.
Curious George Brigade
#34. It is through separation that you will win: no representatives, and no candidates!
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#35. Philosophically, Communism and Anarchism are poles apart. Practically - i.e. in the form of society aimed at - the difference is mainly one of emphasis, but it is quite irreconcilable. The Communist's emphasis is always on centralism and efficiency, the Anarchist's on liberty and equality.
George Orwell
#36. I'm not an anarchist any longer, because I've concluded that anarchism is an impractical ideal.
Robert Anton Wilson
#37. There is one central characteristic of anarchism on the matter of means, and that central principle is a principle of direct action - of not going through the forms that the society offers you, of representative government, of voting, of legislation, but directly taking power.
Howard Zinn
#38. 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
#39. To Pierre," said Mr. Buckmaster, "the Communists are of the Right. The far Right. He refers to them as 'those goddamned Bourbons.' Pierre is an anarchist. That's why he's so happy in his shoplifting--he feels it helps undermine the state.
Poyntz Tyler
#40. Our principle is: to prevent all command over man by his fellowmen, to, make state, government, laws, or whatsoever form of compulsion existing, a thing of the past, to establish full freedom for all. Anarchism means first and foremost freedom from all government.
Johann Most
#41. Where do you want to go, my heart?" "Anywhere - anywhere, out of this world.
CrimethInc.
#42. Capitalistic Anarchism ? Oh, yes, if you choose to call it so. Names are indifferent to me; I am not afraid of bugaboos. Let it be so, then, capitalistic Anarchism.
Voltairine De Cleyre
#43. Is anarchism desirable? Well, who does not seek freedom? What man, unless willing to declare himself in bondage, would care to call any control agreeable? Think about it!
Johann Most
#44. Let us designate anarchism1 anarchism as you define it. Let us desiginate anarchism2 anarchism as I and the American Heritage College Dictionary define it.
Bryan Caplan
#45. 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
#46. Only by concealing our identities can we shed the masks we have to wear at school, at work, even at home - everywhere there is surveillance, policing, punishment - masks that are increasingly indistinguishable from ourselves.
CrimethInc.
#47. If all our comrades of Europe, America and other countries, who do not understand what we are doing to Spanish Anarchism, would come to Spain, we could then see how they would react.
Federica Montseny
#49. Tomorrow will use you the way you use today.
CrimethInc.
#50. ANARCHISM: - The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.
Emma Goldman
#51. Science is essentially an anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
#52. 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
#53. Educate the Russian or the American or the Englishman or the Irishman or Frenchman or any real northern European except German, and you get the Anarchist, that is to say the man who dreams of order without organisation - of something beyond organisation ...
H.G.Wells
#54. In short, Anarchism means a condition or society where all men and women are free, and where all enjoy equally the benefits of an ordered and sensible life.
Alexander Berkman
#55. 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
#56. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.
Bob Black
#57. Anarchism as a political philosophy seeks to dissolve all forms of authority and power, and if possible, wishes their complete abolition.
Peter Marshall
#58. If you would know who controls you see who you may not criticise.
Tacitus
#59. Not whether we accomplish anarchism today, tomorrow, or within ten centuries, but that we walk towards anarchism today, tomorrow, and always.
Errico Malatesta
#60. An anarchist is someone who rejects the curious notion that crimes become virtues as they grow in size.
Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski
#61. Authority, when first detecting chaos at its heels, will entertain the vilest schemes to save its orderly facade.
Alan Moore
#62. Victory will not go to those who can inflict the most suffering, but to those who can survive the most.
CrimethInc.
#63. Anarchism means all sort of things to different people, but the traditional anarchists' movements assumed that there'd be a highly organized society, just one organized from below with direct participation and so on.
Noam Chomsky
#64. Behind every unquestionable belief is a system of control.
Graeme Rodaughan
#65. Anarchism does not demand the changing of the labels on the layers, it doesn't want different people on top, it wants us to clamber out underneath.
Colin Ward
#67. Anarchism? You bet your sweet betsy. The only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. Much more.
Edward Abbey
#68. I firmly believe people have the power to make decisions locally and cooperatively. Anarchism is how that is put into practice.
Scott Crow
#69. Anarchists have a 'bad name' in the media, not because they can point to one indiscriminate massacre by anarchists--there have been none--but because the one thing holders of power fear is that they personally should be held responsible for their own actions
Stuart Christie
#70. We are, in any case, only one of the forces acting in society
Errico Malatesta
#71. If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.
Mikhail Bakunin
#73. 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
#74. In Labor movements generally, success through violence can hardly be expected except in circumstances where success without violence is attainable.
Bertrand Russell
#76. Control and violence that is best reflected in the state, are evil in themselves. In this knowledge lies the great truth of anarchism.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
#77. Independent radical women often live lonely lives if they expect equality.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
#78. Though I knew so far as Anarchism was concerned I was backing a lost cause, it didn't seem to matter as every other cause had won at some time but that of the people themselves. At least it threw so a light on any other political persuasion.
Albert Meltzer
#79. You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#80. School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.
Ivan Illich
#81. The authorities don't grant concessions out of the kindness of their hearts; they simply concede the reality of what their subjects are strong enough to compel from them. If you want political leverage, don't beg for it, don't seek it through their channels - take power outside them.
CrimethInc.
#82. You don't expect me," he said, "to revolutionize society on this lawn?"
Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly.
"No, I don't," he said; "but I suppose that if you were serious about your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do.
G.K. Chesterton
#83. Historical definition of a country's borders ... ... here's where my murder geography ends and your murder geography begins, at least until I get more murderers to expand my murder-fest.
Stefan Molyneux
#84. Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government.
Emma Goldman
#85. At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned
Cormac McCarthy
#86. 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
#87. Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony.
Emma Goldman
#88. Capitalism is the fullest expression of anarchism, and anarchism is the fullest expression of capitalism. Not only are they compatible, but you can't really have one without the other. True anarchism will be capitalism, and true capitalism will be anarchism
Murray N. Rothbard
#89. Proletarians of the world, look into the depths of your own beings, seek out the truth and realise it yourselves: you will find it nowhere else.
Peter Arshinov
#90. An anarchist is like an undercover agent who plays the game of Reason in order to undercut the authority of Reason (Truth, Honesty, Justice and so on).
Paul Karl Feyerabend
#91. anarchism is to Marxism-Leninism what Anabaptism was to the magisterial Reformation: a revolutionary movement predicated upon negating, rather than seizing control of, state power.
Mark Van Steenwyk
#92. 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
#93. Anarchism has a broad back, like paper it endures anything,
Rudolf Rocker
#95. Gun Control: A measure to ensure that guns always point in one direction.
CrimethInc.
#96. If you are a warrior, the nature and scale of your enemies will determine the nature and scale of your actions. In this sense, it is even more important to choose your enemies more wisely than your friends.
CrimethInc.
#97. Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life, it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism.
Bertrand Russell
#98. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#99. Anarchy is a state of society where the only government is reason.
Michael Schwab
#100. Is anarchism possible? The failure of attempts to attain freedom does not mean the cause is lost.
Johann Most
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