Bookchin Quotes

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

Murray Bookchin

#2. 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

#3. Growing up, I missed the whole 'Three Stooges' thing. Either they weren't on the station in my hometown, or we hadn't bought a TV set yet, or they came to town too late for me. I'm pretty sure that at the right age, I would have loved them.

Roger Ebert

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

Murray Bookchin

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Above all, we know that although Americans can be led to make great sacrifices, they do not like to be driven.

Herbert Hoover

#8. 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

#9. You look delectable no matter what you wear...or don't wear."
The suggestive words made her cheeks burn, and she jerked her gaze up to meet his. Amusement and a wickedly seductive flame flashed in his green eyes as he stared down at her.

Monica Burns

#10. There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

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

Murray Bookchin

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

Murray Bookchin

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

Murray Bookchin

#19. Life is surreal and beautiful.

Kenneth Branagh

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

Murray Bookchin

#21. Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.

Harlan Ellison

#22. 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

#23. 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