Emma Goldman famous quotes

wealth means power: the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade.
-- Emma Goldman

#Crush #Mean #Wealth

In modern capitalism economic exploitation rather than political oppression is the real enemy of the people.
-- Emma Goldman

#Real #People #Political

The soldier's business is to take life. For that he is paid by the State, eulogized by political charlatans and upheld by public hysteria. But woman's function is to give life, yet neither the State nor politicians nor public opinion have ever made the slightest provision in return for the life woman has given.
-- Emma Goldman

#Hysteria #Giving #Political

true emancipation ... will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds.
-- Emma Goldman

#Sex #Men #Two

John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?
-- Emma Goldman

#Character #Animal #Space

Men and women ... do you not realize that the State is the worst enemy you have? It is a machine that crushes you in order to sustain the ruling class, your masters. Like naïve children you put your trust in your political leaders. You make it possible for them to creep into your confidence, only to have them betray you to the first bidder. But even where there is no direct betrayal, the labour politicians make common cause with your enemies to keep you in leash, to prevent your direct action. The State is the pillar of capitalism, and it is ridiculous to expect any redress from it.
-- Emma Goldman

#Crush #Betrayal #Children

If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.
-- Emma Goldman

#Men #America #Black

The people are urged to be patriotic ... by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegience to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister.
-- Emma Goldman

#Mother #Brother #Children

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.
-- Emma Goldman

#Blessed #Hands #Giving

Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for her right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men!... The economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution.
-- Emma Goldman

#Sex #Men #Merit

The most violent element in society is ignorance.
-- Emma Goldman

#Peace #Educational #Book

I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.
-- Emma Goldman

#Life #Nature #Flower

There's never been a good government.
-- Emma Goldman

#Government #Liberty

A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish.
-- Emma Goldman

#Anarchy #Oscars #Foolish

The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved.
-- Emma Goldman

#Life #Rights #Justice

‎Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against "society," that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship.
-- Emma Goldman

#Struggle #Civilization #Majority

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.
-- Emma Goldman

#Law #Ideas #Wheels

Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. ... Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.
-- Emma Goldman

#Fighting #Intelligent #Iron

If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
-- Emma Goldman

#Political #Voting #Nerd

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.
-- Emma Goldman

#Independent #Thinking #Effort

To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.
-- Emma Goldman

#Doe #Body #Facts

Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.
-- Emma Goldman

#Atheism #Needs #Mouths

What I believe is a process rather than a finality.
-- Emma Goldman

#Believe #I Believe #Process

If elections really changed anything, they would be outlawed.
-- Emma Goldman

#Would Be #Election #Changed

I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.
-- Emma Goldman

#Sex #Motherhood #Support

How long would authority ... exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen.
-- Emma Goldman

#Long #Soldier #Authority

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?
-- Emma Goldman

#Honesty #Able #Anarchy

The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being.
-- Emma Goldman

#Change #Men #Diversity

The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.
-- Emma Goldman

#War #Apology #Law

Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.
-- Emma Goldman

#Inspirational #Forgiveness #Understanding

The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.
-- Emma Goldman

#Men #Blood #Soul

Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.
-- Emma Goldman

#Change #Race #Vision

Public school - where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression.
-- Emma Goldman

#School #Mind #Moral

A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.
-- Emma Goldman

#Dancing #Revolution

I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years been working to undo the botched job your god has made.
-- Emma Goldman

#Atheist #Jobs #Mistake

'What I believe' is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect.
-- Emma Goldman

#Believe #Government #Anarchy

...The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism.
-- Emma Goldman

#Military #Militarism #Capitalism

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

#Lying #Men #Self

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

#Independent #People #Independence

Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both recreation and hope.
-- Emma Goldman

#Real #Men #Color

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.
-- Emma Goldman

#Men #Two #Phantoms

Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.
-- Emma Goldman

#Feminism #Being Free #Desire

If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.
-- Emma Goldman

#Love #Stress #Giving

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

#Work #Giving #Bread

The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals.
-- Emma Goldman

#Reality #Liberty #Doe

Every society has the criminals it deserves.
-- Emma Goldman

#Criminals #Deserve

Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us to-day. ... The rulers of the earth have realized long ago what potent poison inheres in the Christian religion. That is the reason they foster it; that is why they leave nothing undone to instill it into the blood of the people. They know only too well that the subtleness of the Christian teachings is a more powerful protection against rebellion and discontent than the club or the gun.
-- Emma Goldman

#Christian #Powerful #Teaching

The contention that a standing army and navy is the best security of peace is about as logical as the claim that the most peaceful citizen is he who goes about heavily armed.
-- Emma Goldman

#War #Army #Peaceful

It is essential that we realize once and for all that man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature. The former is inherent, the other is grafted on.
-- Emma Goldman

#Sex #Men #Essentials

Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.
-- Emma Goldman

#Arrogance #Essentials #Conceit

What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!
-- Emma Goldman

#Thinking #Machines #Development

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.
-- Emma Goldman

#Hate #Law #Long

I may be arrested, I may be tried and thrown into jail, but I never will be silent.
-- Emma Goldman

#Jail #May #Silent

I want freedom, the right to self-expression , everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things.
-- Emma Goldman

#Beautiful #Self #Expression

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.
-- Emma Goldman

#Lying #Patriotic #Brotherhood

The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.
-- Emma Goldman

#Peace #Expression #People

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature.
-- Emma Goldman

#Kings #Names #Wickedness

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.
-- Emma Goldman

#Philosophy #Mean #Men

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! All wars are wars among thieves who are too cowardly to fight and who therefore induce the young manhood of the whole world to do the fighting for them.
-- Emma Goldman

#Peace #War #Fighting

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.
-- Emma Goldman

#Determination #Intelligent #Reality

We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens.
-- Emma Goldman

#Hate #People #Joy

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.
-- Emma Goldman

#Fighting #Humanity #Atheism

The most vital right is the right to love and be loved.
-- Emma Goldman

#Love

Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested - for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day.
-- Emma Goldman

#Baby #Color #People

No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution - Revolution is but thought carried into action. Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass.
-- Emma Goldman

#Religious #Real #Effort

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

#Order #Government #Mind

Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails.
-- Emma Goldman

#Men #Mind #Needs

The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.
-- Emma Goldman

#Atheist #Philosophy #Real

To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.
-- Emma Goldman

#Character #Ideas #Intellectual

No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
-- Emma Goldman

#Sympathy #Education #Children

Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.
-- Emma Goldman

#Life #Education #Children

No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution... revolution is but thought carried into action.
-- Emma Goldman

#Real #Politics #Revolution

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.
-- Emma Goldman

#Independent #Independence #Sin

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

#Giving #Force

All claims of education notwithstanding, the pupil will accept only that which his mind craves.
-- Emma Goldman

#Education #Mind #Accepting

On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.
-- Emma Goldman

#Inspirational #Funny #Marriage

The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.
-- Emma Goldman

#Religious #Sacrifice #Political

I was called before the head matron, a tall woman with a stolid face. She began taking my pedigree. What religion? was the first question. None, I am an atheist. Atheism is prohibited here. You will have to go to church. I replied that I would do nothing of the kind. I did not believe in anything the Church stood for and, not being a hypocrite, I would not attend.
-- Emma Goldman

#Atheist #Believe #Hypocrite

The worker who knows the cause of his misery, who understands the make-up of our iniquitous social and industrial system can do more for himself and his kind than Christ and the followers of Christ have ever done for humanity; certainly more than meek patience, ignorance, and submission have done.
-- Emma Goldman

#Ignorance #Humanity #Atheism

Life without an ideal is spiritual death.
-- Emma Goldman

#Spiritual #Spiritual Death