Anarchist Quotes - Page 5

• Understand then all of you, especially the young, that to want to impose an imaginary state of government on others by violence is not only a vulgar superstition, but even a criminal work. Understand that this work, far from assuring the well-being of humanity is only a lie, a more or less unconscious hypocrisy, camouflaging the lowest passions we posses.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Lying, Passion, Government

  Passage written in 1908 for for 'The Law of Love and the Law of Violence'. "Equality in Liberty and Justice". Book by Antony Flew, p. 89, 2001.

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• The whole point of view of the anarchist is that everything must start from the bottom up, from man. It seems to me so human a philosophy.

  Dorothy Day

  Philosophy, Men, Views

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• Never explain - your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Love, Friendship, Best Friend

  The Motto Book (1907)

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• Is anarchism desirable? Well, who does not seek freedom? What man, unless willing to declare himself in bondage, would care to call any control agreeable? Think about it!

  Johann Most

  Men, Thinking, Doe

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• The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Christian, Common, Anarchism

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (2007). “Twilight of the Idols with the Antichrist and Ecce Homo”, p.19, Wordsworth Editions

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• We can either passively continue on the road to utter domestication and destruction or turn in the direction of joyful upheaval, passionate and feral embrace of wildness and life that aims at dancing on the ruins of clocks, computers and that failure of imagination and will called work. Can we justify our lives by anything less than such a politics of rage and dreams?

  John Zerzan

  Inspirational, Life, Dance

  John Zerzan (2012). “Future Primitive Revisited”, p.96, Feral House

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• Anarchists are opposed to violence; everyone knows that. The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. It is life based on freedom of the individual, without the intervention of the gendarme. For this reason we are the enemies of capitalism which depends on the protection of the gendarme to oblige workers to allow themselves to be exploited--or even to remain idle and go hungry when it is not in the interest of the bosses to exploit them. We are therefore enemies of the State which is the coercive violent organization of society.

  Errico Malatesta

  Organization, Boss, Enemy

  Errico Malatesta (2015). “Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta”, p.45, PM Press

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• If we trace origins of anarchism in the United States, then probably Henry David Thoreau is the closest you can come to an early American anarchist. You do not really encounter anarchism until after the Civil War, when you have European anarchists, especially German anarchists, coming to the United States. They actually begin to organize. The first time that anarchism has an organized force and becomes publicly known in the United States is in Chicago at the time of Haymarket Affair.

  Howard Zinn

  War, Chicago, Encounters

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• In order to create it is necessary to destroy; and the agent of destruction in society is the poet. I believe that the poet is necessarily an anarchist, and that he must oppose all organized conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherit from the past, but equally those which are imposed on people in the name of the future.

  Herbert Read

  Believe, Past, Order

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• Anarchism is surprisingly effective in solving actual problems largely because anarchists have thought a lot about solving actual problems on a micro level in ways that other political ideologies don't really feel they have to until after they seize state power.

  David Graeber

  Political, Levels, Way

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I'm the kind of anarchist whose chief objection to the State is that it kills so many people. Government is the epitome of the deathist philosophy I reject.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Philosophy, Government, People

  Source: theanarchistlibrary.org

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• In the Great War, there is no room for the faint-hearted, the cowardly. A criminal or an anarchist will be better conditioned than a bourgeois, indecisive or cowardly man. They only need a push in the right direction. Only one who is born a hero or a warrior has a place in our order. Only the Lord of the Pure Will can march to the end, breaking in the gates of the City of Eternal Life. Because will, through its perseverance, creates the thing it contemplates. Only the Wild Hordes of Odin and Parsifal will achieve the Graal.

  Miguel Serrano

  Perseverance, War, Hero

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• The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries, and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris commune.

  Friedrich Engels

  Mean, Organization, Paris

  Letter to Philipp Van Patten, www.marxists.org. April 18, 1883.

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• All Artists are Anarchists.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Artist

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• Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals. We look away from government for relief, because we know that force (legalized) invades the personal liberty of man, seizes upon the natural elements and intervenes between man and natural laws; from this exercise of force through governments flows nearly all the misery, poverty, crime and confusion existing in society.

  Lucy Parsons

  Believe, Exercise, Men

  "The Principles of Anarchism". A Lecture by Lucy E. Parsons, lucyparsons.org.

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• I am an anarchist in my personal life. I try to live my life in a way that I don't need cops or baby-sitters to keep me from infringing on others. But I don't feel we have evolved far enough as a species to make anarchy work in society itself. We still need government to transfer the wealth from those who have too much to those who have too little, to make sure important projects get done, and keep territorial humans from screwing over and killing each other.

  Jello Biafra

  Baby, Government, Important

  Address to the US Green Party, 2000.

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• There is a certain combination of anarchy and discipline in the way I work.

  Robert De Niro

  Discipline, Way, Anarchy

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• The aims of anarchists and true communists are identical.

  Johann Most

  Communist, Aim, Identical

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• I'm an anarchist. I'm implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest.

  Will Self

  Psychology, Crowds, Common

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• We should try to become better people, ethically speaking, reflect upon ourselves and our very limited existences and develop a sense of tolerance for each other, as well as for other anarchist groups with which we may disagree. But we're not committed to toeing a line called anarchism; there are many different anarchisms.

  Murray Bookchin

  People, Tolerance, Trying

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

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• I am an anarchist, and according to anarchist principles nation states become obstacles to a true humanistic globalization.

  Howard Zinn

  Principles, Obstacles, Globalization

  "Rebels Against Tyranny". Interview with Ziga Vodovnik, www.counterpunch.org. May 12, 2008.

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• I am not a Christian or a Jew or a Mohammedan, a Mormon, Polygamist, Homosexual, Anarchist or Boxer. . . . I do not believe that, in order to be religious in the good and genuine sense of the word, one has to ruin one's love life and has to become rigid and shrunken in body and soul. I know that what you call "God" actually exists, but in a different way from what you think: as the primal cosmic energy in the universe, as your love in your body, as your honesty and your feeling of nature in you and around you.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Christian, Religious, Honesty

  Wilhelm Reich (1948). “Listen, Little Man!: A Document from the Archives of the Orgone Institute”

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• An anarchist does not want to rule others and does not want others to rule him. Nothing is so despicable as half-an-anarchist.

  Frank Van Dun

  Doe, Half, Want

  "Dyslexic Anarchists of the World–Untie1" by Stephan Kinsella, www.lewrockwell.com. January 20, 2004.

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• If I could come out in this book and advocate complete revolution and the violent overthrow of the United States of America, without being thrown in jail, I would not have written The Anarchist Cookbook, and there would be no need for it.

  William Powell

  Book, America, Jail

  "The Anarchist Cookbook" by William Powell, (Introduction), 1971.

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• The artist as an artist must be an anarchist

  Kurt Eisner

  Artist

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