In the plot, people came to the land; the land loved them; they worked and
struggled and had lots of children. There was a Frenchman who talked funny
and a greenhorn from England who was a fancy-pants but when it came to the
crunch he was all courage. Those novels would make you retch.
-- Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, on the generic Canadian
novel.
The work of the anarchist is above all a work of critique. The anarchist goes, sowing revolt against that which oppresses, obstructs, opposes itself to the free expansion of the individual being.
-- Emile Armand
Usually, when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
-- Malcolm X
I reverently believe that the maker who made us all makes everything in New
England, but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it must be
raw apprentices in the weather-clerks factory who experiment and learn how, in
New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to make weather for
countries that require a good article, and will take their custom elsewhere
if they don't get it.
-- Mark Twain
Organised religion has corrupted one of the purest, most powerful and sustaining things in the human condition. It has imposed a middle management, not only in our politics and in our finances, but in our spirituality as well.
-- Alan Moore
Others invent more or less complicated system of mutuality. But in the long run it is always the searching for a more secure guarantee of freedom which is the common factor among anarchists, and which divides them into different schools.
-- Errico Malatesta
The proper method for hastening the decay of error is not by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself.
-- William Godwin
Protestantism has actually put a man in the position of a country governed by secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, "conscience," watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a "matter of conscience," that is, police business.
-- Max Stirner
There are differences in the parties -- I don't think they're great differences, but they're real, and small differences in a system of great power can have enormous consequences.
-- Noam Chomsky
The oppression of one is the oppression of all, and we cannot violate the liberty of one being without violating the freedom of all of us.
-- Mikhail Bakunin
I've touch'd the highest point of all my greatness;
And from that full meridian of my glory
I haste now to my setting. I shall fall,
Like a bright exhalation in the evening
And no man see me more.
-- Shakespeare
I hate communism because it is the negation of liberty and because for me humanity is unthinkable without liberty. I am not a communist, because communism concentrates and swallows up in itself for the benefit of the state all the forces of society, because it inevitably leads to the concentration of property in the hands of the state.
-- Mikhail Bakunin
Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercize such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.
-- Oscar Wilde
Everyone complains about politicians. Everyone says they suck. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky; they don't pass through a membrane from a separate reality. They come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, and American businesses. And they're elected by American voters. This is what our system produces, folks. This is the best we can do.
-- George Carlin
There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable.
-- Peter Kropotkin
It is obvious that in order to act you need a body of coherent ideas. Contradictions and hesitations prevent ideas getting through.
-- Georges Fontenis
The people are asleep; they remain indifferent. They forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters to crucify their Christs.
-- Emma Goldman
If you feel the need to vote in order to avert the immediate threat of fascism, by all means do so... in the meantime, we have a new society to build.
-- Kevin Carson
Stop! There was first a game of blindman's buff. Of course there was.
And I no more believe Topper was really blind than I believe he had eyes
in his boots. My opinion is, that it was a done thing between him and
Scrooge's nephew; and that the Ghost of Christmas Present knew it. The
way he went after that plump sister in the lace tucker, was an outrage
on the credulity of human nature.
In order to fully realise our aspirations, we must create in the masses of the people the sense of sacrifice and responsibility that has been the characteristic of the anarchist movement throughout its historic development in Spain.
-- Frederica Montseny
Whether individually or as a countless mass, man finds himself at the mercy of this band of drones going under the name of "governors and masters," when in reality they are nothing but straightforward exploiters and oppressors.
-- Nestor Makhno
If you list almost all of the assassinations that have been attributed to anarchists and assume that all of them were performed by anarchists (which is a dubious assumption by the way -- many of them were police frame-ups), but on that assumption it still turns out that more anarchists have been murdered by governments than all that can be accused of having murdered governors.
-- Robert Anton Wilson
Did the seed of tyranny ever bear good fruit? And can you expect liberty to undo in a moment what oppression has been doing for ages?
-- Voltairine de Cleyre
The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you.
-- George Carlin
Q: How many elephants can you fit in a VW Bug?
A: Four. Two in the front, two in the back.
Q: How can you tell if an elephant is in your refrigerator?
A: There's a footprint in the mayo.
Q: How can you tell if two elephants are in your refrigerator?
A: There's two footprints in the mayo.
Q: How can you tell if three elephants are in your refrigerator?
A: The door won't shut.
Q: How can you tell if four elephants are in your refrigerator?
A: There's a VW Bug in your driveway.
Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket"--which is
but a manner of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention;" but the wise
man saith, "Put all your eggs in the one basket and--WATCH THAT BASKET."
-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
Without doubt, conventional right, contract and law, even universally and directly exercised, is not natural right, or justice. It is a compromise between anarchy and authority, and everything that is not completely just is injustice.
-- Joseph Dejacque
Those who produce everything have nothing, and those who produce nothing have everything. Such a state of affairs can only produce antagonism between the laboring class and the owning, i.e., do-nothing, class. The fight breaks out and hatred delivers its blows.
-- Marius Jacob
I would rather, much rather, be illegitimate according to the statutes of men, than illegitimate according to the unchanging law of nature.
-- Voltairine de Cleyre
Power has become invincible, and rests no longer on the higher national foundations of anointed right, election, or representation, but on violence alone.
-- Leo Tolstoy
The true and legitimate meaning of the word treason, then, necessarily implies treachery, deceit, breach of faith. Without these, there can be no treason.
-- Lysander Spooner
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