Quotes About Emma Goldman

#1. A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.

Russell Baker

#2. I wanted to be Emma Goldman. I wanted to digest Doris Lessing's Golden Notebooks like biscuits. I felt like Harriet the Spy, looking for a dumbwaiter to hide in, scribbling down all I witnessed.

Susie Bright

#3. People only have as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.
-Emma Goldman

Sophia Amoruso

#4. The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings as in his native land.

Emma Goldman

#5. I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.

Emma Goldman

#6. Prostitution, although hounded, imprisoned, and chained, is nevertheless the greatest triumph of Puritanism.

Emma Goldman

#7. Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage. Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.

Emma Goldman

#8. What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!

Emma Goldman

#9. 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

#10. If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.

Emma Goldman

#11. When primitive man heard thunder or saw the lightning, he could not account for either, and therefore concluded that back of them must be a force greater than himself. Similarly he saw a supernatural force in the rain, and in the various other changes in nature.

Emma Goldman

#12. What is generally regarded as success - acquisition of wealth, the capture of power or social prestige - I consider the most dismal failures. I hold when it is said of a man that he has arrived, it means that he is finished - his development has stopped at that point.

Emma Goldman

#13. Predigested food' should be inscribed over every hall of learning as a warning to all who do not wish to lose their own personalities and their original sense of judgment ...

Emma Goldman

#14. Prison, a social protection? What monstrous mind ever conceived such an idea? Just as well say that health can be promoted by a widespread contagion!

Emma Goldman

#15. Social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass.

Emma Goldman

#16. Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is more binding, more exacting.

Emma Goldman

#17. I don't care if a man's theory for tomorrow is correct, I care if his spirit of today is correct.

Emma Goldman

#18. The people are urged to be patriotic ... by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegience to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister.

Emma Goldman

#19. In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.

Emma Goldman

#20. The State, every government whatever its form, character or color - be it absolute or constitutional, monarchy or republic, Fascist, Nazi or bolshevik - is by its very nature conservative, static, intolerant of change and opposed to it.

Emma Goldman

#21. Those who sit in a glass house do wrong to throw stones about them; besides, the American glass house is rather thin, it will break easily, and the interior is anything but a gainly sight.

Emma Goldman

#22. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right!

Emma Goldman

#23. 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

#24. Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one

Emma Goldman

#25. Revolution is indeed a violent process. But if it is to result only in a change of dictatorship, in a shifting of names and political personalities, then it is hardly worth while.

Emma Goldman

#26. There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can't be.

Emma Goldman

#27. The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.

Emma Goldman

#28. The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass.

Emma Goldman

#29. Always, at every period, the few were the banner bearers of a great idea, of liberating effort. Not so the mass, the leaden weight of which does not let it move.

Emma Goldman

#30. 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

#31. The political criminal is the victim of an attempt of a more or less despotic government to preserve its own stability. He is not necessarily guilty of an unsocial offense; he simply tries to overturn a certain political order which may itself be anti-social.

Emma Goldman

#32. Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.

Emma Goldman

#33. The masses are crude, lame, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them but to drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

Emma Goldman

#34. I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.

Emma Goldman

#35. The powers know that the people at large are like children whose despair, sorrow, and tears can be turned into joy with a little toy ... An army and navy represents the people's toys.

Emma Goldman

#36. If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.

Emma Goldman

#37. If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.

Emma Goldman

#38. When the child has reached manhood he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition ...

Emma Goldman

#39. Militarism consumes the strongest and most productive elements of each nation. Militarism swallows the largest part of the national revenue.

Emma Goldman

#40. There's never been a good government.

Emma Goldman

#41. 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

#42. Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society.

Emma Goldman

#43. With the conception that the Revolution was only a means of securing political power, it was inevitable that all revolutionary values should be subordinated to the needs of the Socialist State; indeed, exploited to further the security of the newly acquired governmental power.

Emma Goldman

#44. Consciously or unconsciously, most theists see in gods and devils, heaven and hell, reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness and contentment. ...

Emma Goldman

#45. The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.

Emma Goldman

#46. Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.

Emma Goldman

#47. Modern woman is no longer satisfied to be the beloved of a man; she looks for understanding, comradeship; she wants to be treated as a human being and not simply as an object for sexual gratification.

Emma Goldman

#48. The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.

Emma Goldman

#49. What will you do with the lazy ones, who would not work?'
No one is lazy. They grow hopeless from the misery of their present existence, and give up. Under our order of things, every men would do the work he liked, and would have as much as his neighbor, so could not be unhappy and discouraged.

Emma Goldman

#50. Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor?

Emma Goldman

#51. The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does not let him expand or grow.

Emma Goldman

#52. Jealousy is the very reverse of understanding, of sympathy, and of generous feeling. Never has jealousy added to character, never does it make the individual big and fine.

Emma Goldman

#53. Even were the workers able to have their own representatives, for which our good Socialist politicians are clamoring, what chances are there for their honesty and good faith?

Emma Goldman

#54. No real social change has ever been
brought about without a revolution -
Revolution is but thought carried into action.
Every effort for progress, for enlightenment,
for science, for religious, political, and
economic liberty, emanates from the minority,
and not from the mass.

Emma Goldman

#55. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.

Emma Goldman

#56. Democracy must first be safe for America before it can be safe for the world.

Emma Goldman

#57. I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years been working to undo the botched job your god has made.

Emma Goldman

#58. On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.

Emma Goldman

#59. If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.

Emma Goldman

#60. 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

#61. When we have undermined the patriotic lie, we shall have cleared the path for the great structure where all shall be united into a universal brotherhood - a truly free society.

Emma Goldman

#62. The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather understand one another.

Emma Goldman

#63. All claims of education notwithstanding, the pupil will accept only that which his mind craves.

Emma Goldman

#64. 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

#65. As to a thorough eradication of prostitution, nothing can accomplish that save a complete transvaluation of all accepted values
especially the moral ones
coupled with the abolition of industrial slavery.

Emma Goldman

#66. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that revolution is in vain unless inspired by its ultimate ideal. Revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims.

Emma Goldman

#67. 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

#68. Redemption through the Cross is worse than damnation, because of the terrible burden it imposes upon humanity, because of the effect it has on the human soul, fettering and paralyzing it with the weight of the burden exacted through the death of Christ.

Emma Goldman

#69. To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.

Emma Goldman

#70. 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

#71. The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.

Emma Goldman

#72. Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.

Emma Goldman

#73. It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.

Emma Goldman

#74. The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.

Emma Goldman

#75. All unnatural unions which are not hallowed by love are prostitution.

Emma Goldman

#76. What's wrong with lust? You fancy your neighbor's husband so what are you supposed to do? Poke your eyes out so that you can't see him anymore? Acting on it is maybe a sin ... but my God, just lusting after someone? Is that so bad?

Emma Goldman

#77. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between two walls.

Emma Goldman

#78. Let us not overlook vital things, because of the bulk of trifles confronting us.

Emma Goldman

#79. It is significant that whenever the public mind is to be diverted from great social wrong, a crusade is inaugurated against indecency.

Emma Goldman

#80. Woman's narrow and purist attitude toward life makes her a greater danger to liberty wherever she has political power. Man haslong overcome the superstitions that still engulf women.

Emma Goldman

#81. Politicians promise you heaven before election and give you hell after

Emma Goldman

#82. I may be arrested, I may be tried and thrown into jail, but I never will be silent.

Emma Goldman

#83. Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.

Emma Goldman

#84. 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

#85. What I prized most was freedom, freedom to do my work, to give myself spontaneously and not out of duty or by command. I could not submit to such demands; rather would I choose the path of a homeless wanderer; yes, even go without love.

Emma Goldman

#86. Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested - for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day.

Emma Goldman

#87. In the face of this approaching disaster, it behooves men and women not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them.

Emma Goldman

#88. The majority represent a mass of cowards, willing to accept him who mirror its own soul and mind poverty.

Emma Goldman

#89. True emancipation ... will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds.

Emma Goldman

#90. It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.

Emma Goldman

#91. The persecution of the innovator and protestant has always been inspired by fear on the part of constituted authority of having its infallibility questioned and its power undermined.

Emma Goldman

#92. To call the State an organism shows a diseased tendency to make a fetish of words.

Emma Goldman

#93. Public school - where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression.

Emma Goldman

#94. The history of human growth is at the same time the history of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn, and the brighter dawn has always been considered illegal, outside of the law.

Emma Goldman

#95. The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals.

Emma Goldman

#96. Mother Liberty caresses with generous affections ... [those] who, armed with the weapons of high-minded honesty, ... have grasped that the freedom of each is rooted in the freedom of all.

Emma Goldman

#97. The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief ... So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies.

Emma Goldman

#98. 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

#99. 'What I believe' is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect.

Emma Goldman

#100. The God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.

Emma Goldman