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Anarchist Quotations
The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that 'the best government is that which governs least,' and that which governs least is no government at all.Benjamin Tucker
"Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us."Leo Tolstoy, Russian Novelist and Christian Anarchist
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
the first self-labeled anarchist
I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality
of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else. That is the alpha
and omega of my argument.
From my point of view the killing of another, except
in defense of human life, is archistic, authoritarian, and therefore, no Anarchist
can commit such deeds. It is the very opposite of what Anarchism stands for...
Joseph Labadie, Anarchism
and Crime
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, "Law
and Authority"
Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have
been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded
parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively
of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence
on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature.
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
Law never made man a whit more just; and by means
of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made agents of injustice.
Henry David Thoreau
The main question ... is not what motive inspired
the law, but what it will be possible for men of bad motive to do with the
law ...
Benamin R. Tucker
Governments and the military purport to protect
the public from enemies, and if there were no enemies they would have to invent
some, for the simple purpose of rationalizing their existence ....
Laurance Labadie, son of Joseph Labadie
Every vote for a governing office is an instrument
for enslaving me.
Dr. M.E. Lazarus, II9
Voting is "merely a labor-saving device for ascertaining
on which side force lies and bowing to the inevitable... It is neither more
nor less than a paper representative of the bayonet, the bully, and the bullet."
Benjamin R. Tucker, 1889
If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example,
by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization,
we certainly cannot do it by force.
Auberon Herbert,
1894
Is not the very beginning of privilege,
monopoly and industrial slavery this erecting of the ballot-box above the
individual?
Benjamin R. Tucker, "The
Ballot-Box Craze", 1882
Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to
man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and
society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they
can be fulfilled only through man's subordination.
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
It's sad to me that such a basic thing as the principled
opposition to coercion
is considered to be extremist, unreasonable, unrealistic. Why do I have to
believe in permanent peace to oppose war? How is it utopian to denounce force?
bkMarcus, Isn't Anarchism Unrealistic?
Statism
is the claim that institutionalized proactive coercion
is justified.
bkMarcus, Isn't Anarchism Unrealistic?
An Anarchist is anyone who denies the necessity
and legitimacy of government; the question of his methods of attacking it
is foreign to the definition.
Benjamin R. Tucker, III
2
"All government in essence," says Emerson, "is tyranny."
It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule.
In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual.
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
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, "What is Anarchy?"
A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either
one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the
existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects
to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish.
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
Dynamite ... is government in its most intensified and
concentrated form ...
Auberon Herbert
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, "What is Anarchy?"
If I can't dance I don't want to be part of
your revolution.
popular
paraphrase of Emma
Goldman
The social revolution is seriously compromised
if it comes through a political revolution.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
In 1903 the United States Congress passed legislation
that banned immigrants who advocated the overthrow of government. Wouldn't
that include the Founding Fathers?
bkMarcus
Anarchy might be imaginary -- meaning that we don't
now and may never have a society without coercive rulers -- but anarchISM
is a value-set, like pacifism or Christian love, or Buddhist empathy. It is
not a description of the world, but a standard for judging situations within
the world.
bkMarcus, Isn't Anarchism Unrealistic?
It takes less effort to condemn than to think.
Emma Goldman
It was play rather than work which enabled man to evolve his higher faculties
-- everything we mean by the word 'culture'.
Herbert
Read, Anarchy & Order
John Burroughs has stated that experimental study
of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits,
their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil
in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily
into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
Liberty is the solution of all social and economic
questions.
Joseph Labadie
Perhaps it is this theory of all work and no play
that has made the Marxist such a very dull boy.
Herbert
Read, Anarchy & Order
Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty,
in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring
to live in.
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
The emotions of the ignorant man are continuously
kept at a pitch by the most blood-curdling stories about Anarchism. Not a
thing too outrageous to be employed against this philosophy and its exponents.
Therefore Anarchism represents to the unthinking what the proverbial bad man
does to the child,--a black monster bent on swallowing everything; in short,
destruction and violence.
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
The "health, education, and welfare" section
of government is another boondoggle. First we manufacture indigent and superfluous
people by legal monopolies in land, money and idea patents, erecting tariff
barriers to protect monopolies from foreign competition, and taxing laborers
to subsidize rich farmers and privileged manufacturers. Then we create "social
workers, " etc., to care for them and thereby establish a self-aggravating
and permanent institutionalized phenomenon ...
Laurance
Labadie, son of Joseph Labadie
The most absurd apology for authority and law is
that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself
the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in
the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has
come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly
to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
...There are some troubles from which mankind can
never escape .... [The anarchists] have never claimed that liberty will bring
perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those
that follow from authority .... As a choice of blessings, liberty is the greater;
as a choice of evils, liberty is the smaller. Then liberty always says the
Anarchist. No use of force except against the invader....
Benamin R. Tucker
There is no freedom that I would grant to any man
that I would refuse to woman, and there is no freedom that I would refuse
to either man or woman except the freedom to invade ... whoever has the ballot
has the freedom to invade, and whoever wants the ballot wants the freedom
to invade. Give woman equality with man, by all means; but do it by taking
power from man, not giving it to woman."
Benjamin R. Tucker, II
8
The State is said by some to be a necessary evil;
it must be made unnecessary.
Benjamin R. Tucker, "Liberty's
Declaration of Purpose"
The student of Liberty must constantly endeavor to
disassociate his imagination from sanguinary dramas of assassination and revolt.
Benjamin R. Tucker, 1883
They do not want to know that centralization
is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of
art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
I believe that the people in power -- not
only political power, but also economic and social power -- will not non-violently
give up that power to the people. Power is not a material possession that
can be given, it is the ability to act. Power must be taken, it is never given.
The Anarchist
Cookbook
Anarchy can no longer be defined as freedom
from oppression or lack of governmental control. It has gone further than
that. It has become, especially in the young people today, a state of mind,
an essence of being. It can be expressed as "doing their own thing," or maybe
just simply having the choice to do or not to do.
The Anarchist
Cookbook
Today has brought forth a great revivial of anarchy
in all fields: politics, arts, music, education, and even to a small degree
in business. Although this surge of individualism is present, you won't find
too many people willing to call it anarchy. But that's just terminology.
The Anarchist
Cookbook
An anarchist is not necessarily a revolutionary, although it is
more common than not that a person who has attempted to rid himself of exterior
controls, for the purpose of developing his own philosophy, will find himself
oppressed.
The Anarchist
Cookbook
This book is not for children or morons.
The Anarchist
Cookbook
If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government
is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.
Benjamin R. Tucker
Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion,
government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control,
or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor,
an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed,
whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary
criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute
monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.
Benjamin R. Tucker
He who attempts to control another is
a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not
changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man ... or by all other
men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.
Benjamin R. Tucker
This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection
of the non-invasive individual to an external will. And this is the Anarchistic
definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an
individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or
masters of the entire people within a given area. As to the meaning of the
remaining term in the subject under discussion, the word "individual," I think
there is little difficulty. Putting aside the subtleties in which certain
metaphysicians have indulged, one may use this word without danger of being
misunderstood.
Benjamin R. Tucker
This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection
of the non-invasive individual to an external will...
Benjamin R. Tucker
Anarchism does not repudiate the right of ownership, but it has a conception
thereof sufficiently different from [others'] to include the possibility of
an end of that social organization which will arise, not out of the ruins
of government, but out of the transformation of government into voluntary
association for defence.
Benjamin R. Tucker
"If it had not been for these thing, I might have live out my life,
talking at street-corners to scorning men. I might have die unmarked, unknown,
a failure. Now we are not a failure. Never in our full life can we hope to
do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man, as
we now do by an accident. Our words - our lives, our pains - nothing! The
taking of our lives, lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-pedlar - all!
That last moment belong to us - that agony is our triumph."
Vanzetti
(of Saccho & Vanzetti) in a letter left in his cell before his exectution.
We see that not only is the emperor naked--he is a murder, tyrant,
brigand, liar, and bungler.
James
W. Harris
Anarchism in its most mature form in the United States, has demanded
freedom, not for one individual or one group, but for each and every individual.
Eunice Minette Schuster, Native American
Anarchism:A Study of Left-Wing American Individualism, 1932
The free and spontaneous inner life of the individual the Anarchists
have regarded as the source of greatest pleasure and also of progress itself
...
Eunice Minette Schuster, Native American
Anarchism:A Study of Left-Wing American Individualism, 1932
The question is, and the Anarchists from the earliest time have
asked this, will the people of the United States allow any authority to destroy
that vital principle of Individuality which finds the greatest personal happiness
and the highest social good in the free and spontaneous development of a rich
individual life, both in thought and in action?
Eunice
Minette Schuster, Native AmericanAnarchism:
A Study of Left-Wing American Individualism, 1932
Viewed in perspective, therefore, the Anarchist movement both native
and foreign suggests two things: first, that Democracy has failed to protect
the critical minority, and second, that authority institutionalized, whether
religious, social, moral, or economic strikes both the one who wields it and
the one who suffers from it.
Eunice
Minette Schuster, Native American
Anarchism: A Study of Left-Wing American Individualism, 1932
All my life I was an "anarchist" without recognizing
that such a term might also represent a formal philosophy I could possibly
80% agree with. The bulk of these "agreements" I now discover I have with
Bakunin or Tucker or Spooner, I'd had no idea:
I had to think all that stuff through myself.
Paul
Knatz
On the free market, everyone earns according to
his productive value in satisfying consumer desires. Under statist distribution,
everyone earns in proportion to the amount he can plunder from the producers.
Murray N. Rothbard
They maintain that only a dictatorship -- their dictatorship,
of course -- can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is:
No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and
it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created
only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people
and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.
Mikhail Bakunin
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, the Utopia
USA interview
The
measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people,
while the word state does not.
Joseph
Sobran, Anarchy without Fear
Even if we are all doomed to live under the
state, it doesn't follow that there is, or even can be, such a thing as a
good state.
Joseph Sobran,
The State: Evil and Idol
Thus does a 'necessary evil' become an idol. Maybe
we're stuck with it. But do we have to worship it?
Joseph
Sobran, The State: Evil and Idol
Since outright slavery has been discredited, democracy
is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will
accept.
Joseph Sobran, The Myth of "Limited Government"
There can be no such thing as "limited government,"
because there is no way to control an entity that in principle enjoys a monopoly
of power...
Joseph Sobran, The Myth of "Limited Government"
Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain
power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves.
Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves.
Joseph Sobran, The Myth of "Limited Government"
Anarchism is my declaration of peace with
you. It is a repudiation of the use of coercive power to achieve my own ends,
or to abet the domination of any man by his fellows, or over his fellows.
Cat
Farmer
Good intentions are no excuse for making prisoners
and hostages of people who have less political clout than you do.
Cat
Farmer
Anarchism is my statement of intention to mind my
own business, and not to interest myself in yours beyond what is welcome,
mannerly, and appropriate to our relationship, because I expect the same courtesy
from you. We will only care about each other when our relationship is peaceful,
and it is not a peaceful act to care to the extent of violating another person's
boundaries.
Cat Farmer
If you honestly value diversity, yet believe that
it must be administered or doled out by a central authority, you anticipate
that the one thing that is most capable of killing diversity, and also has
the best incentive to destroy it, will magically act to preserve it.
Cat
Farmer
Giving diversity a limited range of acceptable ways
in which it can manifest doesn't honor it any more than protest zones honor
the right to free speech; that's just another way to quarantine the healthy
elements of society against infecting the diseased ones.
Cat
Farmer
Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite social-psychological
hypothesis: that forceful, graceful and intelligent behaviour occurs only
when there is an uncoerced and direct response to the physical and social
environment; that in most human affairs, more harm than good results from
compulsion, top-down direction, bureaucratic planning, pre-ordained curricula,
jails, conscription, states.
Paul
Goodman, Like A Conquered Province, 1965, Chapter 6: "Is American democracy
viable?"
When we vote in an election, we are declaring,
by our actions, our support for the process of some people ruling others by
coercive means.
Butler Shaffer
Show me the government that does not infringe
upon anyone's rights, and I will no longer call myself an anarchist.
Jacob Halbrooks
When you advocate any government action, you
must first believe that violence is the best answer to the question at hand.
Allen Thornton, Laws of the Jungle
Will you and your government teach eagles to fly
and tigers to hunt? Of course not. No one is so arrogant with nature. But
you and your government want to tell me what to buy and how to live, and I
am more complex than any eagle or tiger. Give me only the same respect you
pay the badger and the blue jay, and leave me alone. After all, anarchy means
nothing more than human ecology. Allen
Thornton, Laws of the Jungle
I believe that although there are certain important tasks which for special reasons are difficujlt to do under institutions of total private property, these difficulties are in principle, and may be in practice, soluble. I hold that there are no proper functions of government. In that sense I am an anarchist.David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
That forcible government is a moral wrong in itself is enough reason to abolish it, even if market solutions were not an improvement.Brad Edmonds
To be an anarchist only means that
you believe that aggression is not justified, and that states necessarily
employ aggression. And, therefore, that states, and the aggression they
necessarily employ, are unjustified. It's quite simple, really. It's an
ethical view, so no surprise it confuses utilitarians.
N. Stephan Kinsella
I do not think we will see a stateless society
in my lifetime. But I am sure we will not see a state that conforms to the
minarchists' ideals. The closer we get, the better, but I see no reason
not to aspire for the best government as Thoreau
imagined it: none at all. It's certainly more consistently idealistic than
what the minarchists imagine, and yet it's at least possible, whereas the
existence of a lasting, minimal state is a hopeless fantasy.
Anthony Gregory, The Minarchist's
Dilemma