Emma Goldman Quotes
Idealists foolish enough to throw caution to the winds have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.
When we have undermined the patriotic lie, we shall have cleared the path for the great structure where all shall be united into a universal brotherhood — a truly free society.
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.
The triumph of the philosophy of Atheism is to free man from the nightmare of gods; it means the dissolution of the phantoms of the beyond.
True, we have no conscription; that is, men are not usually forced to enlist in the army, but we have developed a far more exacting and rigid force-necessity.
Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world, the mottos of which are: 'To take is more blessed than to give'; 'buy cheap and sell dear'; 'one soiled hand washes the other.
The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings as in his native land.
Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one
Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of women is responsible for prostitution.
Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony.
All claims of education notwithstanding, the pupil will accept only that which his mind craves.
Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage: "Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.
Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.
Morality and its victim, the mother - what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?
One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; the extreme thing is generally the true thing.
No, it is not because woman is lacking in responsibility, but because she has too much of the latter that she demands to know how to prevent conception.
Leo Tolstoy ... defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.
Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be.
The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.
all government, whatever its forms or pretenses, is a dead weight that paralyzes the free spirit and activities of the masses.
Social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass.
religion and morality are a much better whip to keep people in submission than even the club and the gun.
It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.
No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law?
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.
The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class.
The American suffrage movement has been, until very recently, altogether a parlor affair, absolutely detached from the economic needs of the people.
The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.
Mankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods; nothing but pain and persecution have been man's lot since gods began.
It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.
Even were the workers able to have their own representatives, for which our good Socialist politicians are clamoring, what chances are there for their honesty and good faith?
The powers know that the people at large are like children whose despair, sorrow, and tears can be turned into joy with a little toy. ... An army and navy represents the people's toys.
We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America.
Thinking men and women the world over are beginning to realize that patriotism is too narrow and limited a conception to meet the necessities of our time.
Militarism consumes the strongest and most productive elements of each nation. Militarism swallows the largest part of the national revenue.
