Top 60 Kropotkin Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Kropotkin

#1. As there would be no more inheritance, there would be no more greed. Peter Kropotkin

#2. I first came to Russia because of the culture, literature and music ... and my interest in the 19th-century revolutionary spirit of Herzen, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Russia is a wonderful place to bring new clowns because Russians give back a wonderful response.

Patch Adams

#3. 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

#4. Peter Kropotkin ... was recognized by friend and foe as one of the greatest minds ... of the nineteenth century ... The lucidity and brilliance of his mind combined with his warm-heartednes s into the harmonious whole of a fascinating and gracious personality.

Emma Goldman

#5. 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

#6. Educated men - "civilized," as Fourier used to say with disdain - tremble at the idea that society might some day be without judges, police, or gaolers.

Peter Kropotkin

#7. Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor.

Peter Kropotkin

#8. When we have but the will to do it, that very moment will Justice be done: that very instant the tyrants of the Earth shall bite the dust.

Peter Kropotkin

#9. 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

#10. All things for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men worked to produce them in the measure of their strength, and since it is not possible to evaluate everyone's part in the production of the world's wealth ... All is for all!

Peter Kropotkin

#11. 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

#12. The immense and ever increasing sums which the state wrings from the people are never enough for it; it mortgages the income of future generations, and steers resolutely toward bankruptcy.

Peter Kropotkin

#13. The two great movements of our century
towards Liberty of the individual and social co-operation of the whole community
are summed up in Anarchist-Communism.

Peter Kropotkin

#14. Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown.

Peter Kropotkin

#15. It is only by the abolition of the State, by the conquest of perfect liberty by the individual, by free agreement, association, and absolute free federation that we can reach Communism - the possession in common of our social inheritance, and the production in common of all riches.

Peter Kropotkin

#16. 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

#17. All this we see, and, therefore, instead of inanely repeating the old formula, Respect the law, we say, Despise law and all its Attributes! In place of the cowardly phrase, Obey the law, our cry, is Revolt against all laws!

Peter Kropotkin

#18. The State is only one of the forms assumed by society in the course of history. Why then make no distinction between what is permanent and what is accidental?

Peter Kropotkin

#19. We take men for what they are worth - and that is why we hate the government of man by man, and that we work with all our might - perhaps not strong enough - to put an end to it.

Peter Kropotkin

#20. Poverty, the existence of the poor, was the first cause of riches.

Peter Kropotkin

#21. Idlers do not make history: they suffer it!

Peter Kropotkin

#22. As an anarchist, I cannot reconcile myself to any government.

Peter Kropotkin

#23. War is the usual condition of Europe.

Peter Kropotkin

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. Go! And remember! Zebra is fine creature to admire, but you do not have to ride it.

John Allison

#29. Struggle so that all may live this rich, overflowing life. And be sure that in this struggle you will find a joy greater than anything else can give.

Peter Kropotkin

#30. In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it.

Peter Kropotkin

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

Pyotr Kropotkin

#32. 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

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

Pyotr Kropotkin

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

Pyotr Kropotkin

#35. The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.

Peter Kropotkin

#36. Of all parties I now see only one party- The Anarchist- which respects human life, and loudly insists upon the abolition of capital punishment, prison torture and punishment of man by man altogether.

Peter Kropotkin

#37. A national movement, which does not include in its platform the demand for an economical change advantageous to the masses has no chance of success unless supported by foreign aid.

Peter Kropotkin

#38. variety is life; uniformity is death

Pyotr Kropotkin

#39. You know how I always believe in the future ... Without disorder, the revolution is impossible; knowing that, I did not lose hope, and I do not lose it now.

Peter Kropotkin

#40. Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?

Peter Kropotkin

#41. Waste of time is the leading feature of our present education. Not only are we taught a mass of rubbish, but what is not rubbish is taught so as to make us waste over it as much time as possible.

Peter Kropotkin

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

Pyotr Kropotkin

#43. When we ask for the abolition of the State and its organs we are always told that we dream of a society composed of men better than they are in reality. But no; a thousand times, no. All we ask is that men should not be made worse than they are, by such institutions!

Peter Kropotkin

#44. It is often said that Anarchists live in a world of dreams to come, and do not see the things which happen today. We do see them only too well, and in their true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forest of prejudice that besets us.

Peter Kropotkin

#45. Revolutions, we must remember, are always made by minorities.

Peter Kropotkin

#46. No evolution is accomplished in nature without revolution. Periods of very slow changes are succeeded by periods of violent changes. Revolutions are as necessary for evolution as the slow changes which prepare them and succeed them.

Peter Kropotkin

#47. While in the course of ages the nucleus of social custom inscribed in law has been subjected to but slight and gradual modifications, the other portion has been largely developed in directions indicated by the interests of the dominant classes, and to the injury of the classes they oppress.

Peter Kropotkin

#48. You reason like the king, who, being sent across the frontier, called out, 'What will become of my poor subjects without me?'

Peter Kropotkin

#49. Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization

Peter Kropotkin

#50. If you want to know the people of a nation, I am sure you can judge a great deal more about them from their cooking and eating traditions than you can from the words and actions of their public officials.

Peter Kropotkin

#51. 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

#52. America is just the country that how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.

Peter Kropotkin

#53. The moral sense is a natural faculty in us like the sense of smell or of touch.

Peter Kropotkin

#54. The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror.

Peter Kropotkin

#55. True progress lies in the direction of decentralization, both territorial and functional, in the development of the spirit of local and personal initiative, and of free federation from the simple to the compound, in lieu of the present hierarchy from the centre to the periphery.

Peter Kropotkin