Anarchist Quotes - Page 13

• If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.

  Benjamin Tucker

  Government, Anarchy, Individual

  Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1972). “State Socialism and Anarchism and Other Essays”, Ralph Myles Pub

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• There are some troubles from which mankind can never escape .... 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.

  Benjamin Tucker

  Blessing, Evil, Perfection

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• When you have been just told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Love, Girl, Bombs

  "Summer Lightning". Book by P. G. Wodehouse, 1929.

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• GENTLE READER: You, sir, are an anarchist, and Miss Manners is frightened to have anything to do with you. It is true that questioning the table manners of others is rude. But to overthrow the accepted conventions of society, on the flimsy grounds that you have found them silly, inefficient and discomforting, is a dangerous step toward destroying civilization.

  Judith Martin

  Silly, Civilization, Rude

  Judith Martin (1982). “Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior”, Scribner

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• When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Upset, Students, Found

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• There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little. Too many anarchists in 19th-century Europe—Bakunin, Proudhon, Salverio Friscia—were Masons for it to be pure chance. Lovers of global conspiracy, not all of them Catholic, can count on the Masons for a few good shivers and voids when all else fails.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Believe, Eye, Pyramids

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• Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Forgotten, Century, Martyr

  Ursula K. LeGuin (2015). “The Dispossessed”, p.151, Hachette UK

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• I am NOT an anarchist. Never have been, never will be. Just because Crimethinc put out two of my poetry books, I am labeled everywhere as an anarchist poet. I am a poet, yes. Not an anarchist. I have no formulated political philosophy other than a general feeling of disgust for the majority of the human race.

  Raegan Butcher

  Philosophy, Book, Race

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• The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy-the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops

  William Saroyan

  Spiritual, Cheer, Men

  William Saroyan, William E. Justice (2008). “He flies through the air with the greatest of ease: a William Saroyan reader”, Heyday Books

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• 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 Tucker

  Government, Definitions, Anarchy

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• All these young millionaires were anarchists, of course: when a man possesses everything it is the supreme luxury for him to deny society: for in that way he can evade his responsibilities

  Romain Rolland

  Responsibility, Men, Luxury

  Romain Rolland (1910). “Dawn. Morning. Youth. Revolt”

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• We will not be derailed by criminal anarchists who legitimately claim a religious cause.

  John F. Kerry

  Inspiring, Religious, Causes

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• We love the indomitable bellicose patriotism that sets you apart; we love the national pride that guides your muscularly courageous race; we love the potent individualism that doesn't prevent you from opening your arms to individualists of every land, whether libertarians or anarchists.

  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

  Pride, Race, Land

  "Futurist Speech to the English". Lecture at the Lyceum Club of London in 1910. "Marinetti: Selected Writings", 1972.

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• We must institute a coup d'etat, a third revolution, which must beat down anarchy. Dissolve the Paris Commune and destroy its sections! Dissolve the clubs, which preach disorder and equality! Close the Jacobin Club and seal up its papers! ... The triumvirate of Robespierre, Danton and Marat, all the 'levellers', all the anarchists. Then a new Convention will be elected.

  Jacques Pierre Brissot

  Paris, Anarchy, Revolution

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• 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

  Party, Men, Prison

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• During the first two months of the war it was the Anarchists more than anyone else who had saved the situation, and much later than this the Anarchist militia, in spite of their indiscipline, were notoriously the best fighters among the purely Spanish forces.

  George Orwell

  War, Two, Months

  George Orwell (2016). “Homage to Catalonia / Down and Out in Paris and London”, p.66, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I told my kids I just want three words on my tombstone, if I have one. I'll probably be cremated. One is "woman." I'm very comfortable in that role. I've loved being a woman, I've loved being a mother, I've loved being a grandmother. I want three words: Woman, Atheist, Anarchist. That's me.

  Madalyn Murray O'Hair

  Mother, Atheist, Tombstone

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• We are not utopians, we do not “dream” of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and "foremen and accountants".

  Vladimir Lenin

  Dream, People, Different

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• Jacobins, I have a truth to tell you. You do not know your most deadly enemies; they are the constitutional priests. It is they who protest most in the provinces against anarchists, disorganisers, Dantonism, Robespierrism, Jacobinism... Do not cherish any longer the popular errors; cut at the roots of superstition! Declare openly that the priests are your enemies.

  Jean-Paul Marat

  Cutting, Errors, Roots

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• 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

  Believe, Government, Anarchy

  Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1972). “State Socialism and Anarchism and Other Essays”, Ralph Myles Pub

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• I've been labelled many times - a criminal, an anarchist, a rebel, sometimes human garbage, but never a philosopher, which is a pity because that's what I am. I chose a life apart from the common flow, not only because the common flow makes me sick but because I question the logic of the flow, and not only that - I don't know if the flow exists! Why should I chain myself to the wheel when the wheel itself might be a construct, an invention, a common dream to enslave us?

  Steve Toltz

  Dream, Sick, Criminals

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• The anarchist, as the born foe of authority, will be destroyed by it after damaging it more or less. The anarch, on the other hand, has appropriated authority; he is sovereign. He therefore behaves as a neutral power vis-à-vis state and society. He may like, dislike, or be indifferent to whatever occurs in them. That is what determines his conduct; he invests no emotional values.

  Ernst Junger

  Emotional, Hands, Sovereign

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