anj > anj's Quotes

“No man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire.”
― Lysander Spooner

“In proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you.”
― Albert Jay Nock

“We don't need unity in theory, we need solidarity in practice.”
― Curious George Brigade, Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs

“Nearly every "serious" anarchist writer in recent years has tried to distance anarchism from chaos. Yet for most ordinary people, chaos and anarchy are forever linked. The connection between chaos and anarchism should be rethought and embraced, instead of being downplayed and repressed. Chaos is the nightmare of rulers, states, and capitalists. We should not polish the image of anarchism by erasing chaos. Instead, we should remember that chaos is not only burning ruins but also butterfly wings.”
― Curious George Brigade, Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs

“When desertion is not an option, sabotage is a must.”
― Curious George Brigade

“No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.”
― Rose Wilder Lane

“I'm not scared of the Maos and the Stalins and the Hitlers.
I'm scared of the thousands of millions of people that hallucinate them to be "authority", and so do their bidding, and pay for their empires, and carry out their orders.
I don't care if there's one looney with a stupid moustache. He's not a threat if the people do not believe in "authority".”
― Larken Rose

“A person who says “every person has a right to a decent education” may not actually mean “people should be robbed to support bad schools” or “all children should be forced into a prison-like building for 12 years.”
― Jeffrey Tucker

“You cannot have an agency that defends your property, which also has the right to violate your property rights at will. That's like hiring a bodyguard that you pay to beat you up randomly.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.”
― Murray N. Rothbard

“If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized.”
― Lysander Spooner

“So long as tyranny exists, in whatever form, man's deepest aspiration must resist it as inevitably as man must breathe.”
― Emma Goldman

“The anarchy that threatens a degrading society is not its punishment, but its remedy.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“Yes I pay taxes... There are no ethics in the face of coercion, that is blaming the victim. Focus on the man with the gun, not the man in the crosshairs trying to survive.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“I feel sure that the police are helping us more than I could do in ten years. They are making more anarchists than the most prominent people connected with the anarchist cause could make in ten years. If they will only continue I shall be very grateful; they will save me lots of work.”
― Emma Goldman

“People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.”
― Emma Goldman

“If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.”
― Emma Goldman

“ Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root.”
― Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love

“The most violent element in society is ignorance. ”
― Emma Goldman

“Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion and liberation of the human body from the coercion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. It stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals…”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

“Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

“Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.”
― Emma Goldman

“Every society has the criminals it deserves.”
― Emma Goldman, Red Emma Speaks: Selected Writings & Speeches

“Give us what belongs to us in peace, and if you don't give it to us in peace, we will take it by force.”
― Emma Goldman

“What will you do with the lazy ones, who would not work?'

No one is lazy. They grow hopeless from the misery of their present existence, and give up. Under our order of things, every men would do the work he liked, and would have as much as his neighbor, so could not be unhappy and discouraged.”
― Emma Goldman

“Consciously or unconsciously, most theists see in gods and devils, heaven and hell, reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness and contentment.…”
― Emma Goldman

“Destruction and violence! How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance; that its power of destruction is the very thing Anarchism is combating? Nor is he aware that Anarchism, whose roots, as it were, are part of nature's forces, destroys, not healthful tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life's essence of society. It is merely clearing the soil from weeds and sagebrush, that it may eventually bear healthy fruit.”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

“Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor?”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

“Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.”
― Étienne de La Boétie

“The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys:
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches, and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,
A mechanised automaton.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley