Far from checking the spread of immorality, repression has always extended and deepended it. Thus it is futile to oppose it by rigorous legislation which trespasses on individual liberty.
-- Daniel Guerin
Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.
-- William Godwin
Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is
nothing but cabbage with a college education.
-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
The lovely woman-child Kaa was mercilessly chained to the cruel post of
the warrior-chief Beast, with his barbarian tribe now stacking wood at
her nubile feet, when the strong clear voice of the poetic and heroic
Handsomas roared, 'Flick your Bic, crisp that chick, and you'll feel my
steel through your last meal!'
-- Winning sentence, 1984 Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest.
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled utopian.
-- Emma Goldman
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
-- Frederick Douglass
Gone With The Wind LITE(tm)
-- by Margaret Mitchell
A woman only likes men she can't have and the South gets trashed.
Gift of the Magi LITE(tm)
-- by O. Henry
A husband and wife forget to register their gift preferences.
The Old Man and the Sea LITE(tm)
-- by Ernest Hemingway
An old man goes fishing, but doesn't have much luck.
Drawn at first to socialism, I was not slow in separating myself from that party. I have too much love of freedom, too much respect for individual initiative, too much repugnance for military organization, to assume a number in the ordered army of the fourth estate.
-- Emile Henry
Wheresoever it be, there will exist the power of certain men over others, and there will not be freedom, but there will be the oppression of one portion of mankind by another. Therefore power must be abolished.
-- Leo Tolstoy
It is society that makes criminals and you, jury members, instead of striking you should use your intelligence and your strength to transform society. In one fell swoop you'll suppress all crime. And your work, in attacking causes, will be greater and more fruitful than your justice, which belittles itself in punishing its effects.
-- Ravachol
So that is why anarchists keep coming back to the question of what anarchism is. Because anarchism is not a political movement. Or rather it is, but only in a minor aspect.
-- Alfredo Bonanno
Hanged in Chicago, beheaded in Germany, garroted in Jerez, shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Montbrison and in Paris, our dead are many; but you have not been able to destroy anarchy.
-- Emile Henry
Private capitalism, condemned by history, only survives today thanks to the arms race on the one hand, and the comparative failure of state communism on the other.
-- Daniel Guerin
Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society.
-- Emma Goldman
Basically, revolutionaries never go far enough, and if they're not going to go far enough, they should stop upsetting people. Or killing them, for that matter.
-- Bob Black
In anarchy, there are as many "moralities" as there are anarchists, taken individually, or groups or associations of anarchists. Thus, in anarchy, one is amoral.
-- Emile Armand
Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is
particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself,
to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.
But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands
shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit
me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
-- Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"
The two principles referred to are authority and liberty, and the names of the two schools of socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or the other of them are, respectively, state socialism and anarchism.
-- Benjamin Tucker
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