Emma Goldman Quotes

Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society.

Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.

I believe - indeed, I know - that whatever is fine and beautiful in the human expresses and asserts itself in spite of government, and not because of it.

... resistance to tyranny is man's highest ideal.

The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.

There are, however, some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and Bigotry — the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth.

The State is a term for the legislative and administrative machinery whereby certain business of the people is transacted, and badly so.

Those who sit in a glass house do wrong to throw stones about them; besides, the American glass house is rather thin, it will break easily, and the interior is anything but a gainly sight.

There is no hope even that woman, with her right to vote, will ever purify politics.

I don't care if a man's theory for tomorrow is correct, I care if his spirit of today is correct.

Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.

The average mind is easily content with inherited and acquired things, or with the dicta of parents and teachers, because it is much easier to imitate than to create.

Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in.

The import is not the kind of work woman does, but rather the quality of the work she furnishes.

Religion is a superstition that originated in man's mental inability to solve natural phenomena. The Church is an orgainized institution that has always been stumbling to block progress.

Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions.

... the keynote of government is injustice.

Pettiness separates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big.

If I can not dance, I want no part in your revolution.

After all, that is what laws are for, to be made and unmade.

Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race.

Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society.

Love needs no protection; it is its own protection.

Always, at every period, the few were the banner bearers of a great idea, of liberating effort. Not so the mass, the leaden weight of which does not let it move.

The majority represent a mass of cowards, willing to accept him who mirror its own soul and mind poverty.

Let us not overlook vital things, because of the bulk of trifles confronting us.

If elections really changed anything, they would be outlawed.

The persecution of the innovator and protestant has always been inspired by fear on the part of constituted authority of having its infallibility questioned and its power undermined.

Why waste your life working for a few shillings a week in a scullery, eighteen hours a day, when a woman could earn a decent wage by selling her body instead?

If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right!

The history of human growth is at the same time the history of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn, and the brighter dawn has always been considered illegal, outside of the law.

It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that revolution is in vain unless inspired by its ultimate ideal. Revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims.

It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance" that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.

We shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next door neighbors should hear that freeborn citizens dare not speak in the open.

The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.

A politician, he knows that the majority cares little for ideals or integrity. What it craves is display.

Understand one another.

The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does not let him expand or grow.

True emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in the courts. It begins in woman's soul.

More pernicious than the power of a dictator is that of a class; the most terrible - the tyranny of a majority.

The benefits brought to the Russian people by Bolshevism exist only on paper painted in glowing colors by Bolshevist propaganda.

The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass.

... woman's narrow and purist attitude toward life makes her a greater danger to liberty wherever she has political power. Man haslong overcome the superstitions that still engulf women.

You have opened up the prison gates of my womanhood. And all the passion that was unsatisfied in for me so many years, leaped into a wild reckless storm boundless as the sea.

There can be no freedom in the large sense of the word, no harmonious development, so long as mercenary and commercial considerations play an important part in the determination of personal conduct.

It is significant that whenever the public mind is to be diverted from great social wrong, a crusade is inaugurated against indecency.

... if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but itcan not do without that life.

Christ and his teachings are the embodiment of submission, of inertia, of the denial of life; hence responsible for the things done in their name.

Mother Liberty caresses with generous affections...[those] who, armed with the weapons of high-minded honesty,...have grasped that the freedom of each is rooted in the freedom of all.

Anarchism...stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral.