Errico Malatesta Quotes

#1. 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

#2. That doesn't mean that you should just sit back and just let accidents happen to you. No, you have to go out and cause them yourself. That way you're in control of the situation.

P. J. O'Rourke

#3. The freedom we want, for ourselves and for others, is not an absolute metaphysical, abstract freedom which in practice is inevitably translated into the oppression of the weak; but it is real freedom, possible freedom, which is the conscious community of interests, voluntary solidarity.

Errico Malatesta

#4. Intuition is soul guidance, appearing naturally in man during those instants when his mind is calm.

Paramahansa Yogananda

#5. Impossibility never prevented anything from happening.

Errico Malatesta

#6. We follow ideas and not men, and rebel against this habit of embodying a principle in a man.

Errico Malatesta

#7. If you pretend to have authority, people never question you.

Jennifer Close

#8. Sometimes you have to say, 'Today's just not my day.

Jillian Medoff

#9. While preaching against every kind of government, and demanding complete freedom, we must support all struggles for partial freedom, because we are convinced that one learns through struggle,

Errico Malatesta

#10. We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves.

Errico Malatesta

#11. Men need marriage more than women do. In fact, they need it to survive.

Hanna Rosin

#12. The person who thinks with [their] own brain is to be preferred to the one who blindly approves everything ... Better an error consciously committed and in good faith, than a good action performed in a servile manner.

Errico Malatesta

#13. Using your car as a weapon and impenetrable armor.

Paulo Coelho

#14. For anarchy to succeed or simply to advance towards its success it must be conceived not only as a lighthouse which illuminates and attracts, but as something possible and attainable, not in centuries to come, but in a relatively short time and without relying on miracles ...

Errico Malatesta

#15. Hate does not produce love, and by hate one cannot remake the world.

Errico Malatesta

#16. Success in business, as in life, is often largely just a matter of luck.

Felix Rohatyn

#17. I got fairly good grades, but I was bad at woodwork. They said I tried hard, but the result was hopeless.

Jonathan Stroud

#18. By anarchist spirit I mean that deeply human sentiment, which aims at the good of all, freedom and justice for all, solidarity and love among the people; which is not an exclusive characteristic only of self-declared anarchists, but inspires all people who have a generous heart and an open mind.

Errico Malatesta

#19. Organisation, far from creating authority, is the only cure for it and the only means whereby each of us will get used to taking an active and conscious part in collective work, and cease being passive instruments in the hands of leaders.

Errico Malatesta

#20. Experience through freedom is the only means to arrive at the truth and the best solutions; and there is no freedom if there is not the freedom to be wrong.

Errico Malatesta

#21. Defining yourself in opposition to something is still being anaclitic on that thing, isn't it?

David Foster Wallace

#22. The only limit to the oppression of government is the power with which the people show themselves capable of opposing it.

Errico Malatesta

#23. Socialism and federalism are necessarily political opposites, because the former demands that centralized concentration of power which the latter by definition denies.

Felix Morley

#24. Not whether we accomplish anarchism today, tomorrow, or within ten centuries, but that we walk towards anarchism today, tomorrow, and always.

Errico Malatesta

#25. We are, in any case, only one of the forces acting in society

Errico Malatesta