Murray Bookchin famous quotes

04-17-2025

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Thinking #Acid #Visionaries
To speak of â€˜limits to growthâ€™ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be â€˜persuadedâ€™ to limit growth than a human being can be â€˜persuadedâ€™ to stop breathing. Attempts to â€˜greenâ€™ capitalism, to make it â€˜ecologicalâ€™, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Warrior #Breathing #Growth
If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Impossible #Unthinkable
An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Practice #Principles #Anarchist
If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex)â€¦ Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Men #Thinking #Animal
Capitalism is a social cancer. It has always been a social cancer. It is the disease of society. It is the malignancy of society.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Cancer #Disease #Social
Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity that will use its collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations, scientific knowledge, and innate creativity for its own benefit and for that of the natural world, all ecological problems will have their roots in social problems.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Creativity #Roots #Achievement
Nor do piecemeal steps however well intended, even partially resolve problems that have reached a universal, global and catastrophic character. If anything, partial 'solutions' serve merely as cosmetics to conceal the deep seated nature of the ecological crisis. They thereby deflect public attention and theoretical insight from an adequate understanding of the depth and scope of the necessary changes.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Character #Understanding #Necessary Change
Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Eye #Technology #Long
The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Diversity #Unity #Use
What solidarity we do find exists despite the society, against all its realities, as an unending struggle between the innate decency of man and the innate indecency of the society. Can we imagine how men would behave if this decency could find full release, if society earned the respect, even the love of the individual?
-- Murray Bookchin

#Struggle #Reality #Men
People are never free of trying to be content.
-- Murray Bookchin

#People #Trying #Contentment
There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Differences #Hierarchy #Function
The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Earth #Spirit #Humans
Capitalism can no more be 'persuaded' to limit growth than a human being can be 'persuaded' to stop breathing. Attempts to 'green' capitalism, to make it 'ecological', are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Breathing #Growth #Green
Peter Kropotkin described Anarchism as the extreme left wing of socialism - a view with which I completely agree. One of my deepest concerns today is that the libertarian socialist core will be eroded by fashionable, post- modernist, spiritualist, mystic individualism.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Views #Wings #Libertarian
In our own time we have seen domination spread over the social landscape to a point where it is beyond all human control. Compared to this stupendous mobilization of materials, of wealth, of human intellect, of human labor for the single goal of domination, all other recent human achievements pale to almost trivial significance. Our art, science, medicine, literature, music and charitable acts seem like mere droppings from a table on which gory feasts on the spoils of conquest have engaged the attention of a system whose appetite for rule is utterly unrestrained.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Art #Medicine #Goal
Power to the people' can only be put into practice when the power exercised by social elites is dissolved into the people. Each individual can then take control of his daily life. If 'Power to the people' means nothing more than power to the 'leaders' of the people, then the people remain an undifferentiated, manipulatable mass, as powerless after the revolution as they were before. In the last analysis, the people can never have power until they disappear as a 'people.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Mean #Practice #People
As long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Long #Humanity #Hierarchy
We are part of nature, a product of a long evolutionary journey. To some degree, we carry the ancient oceans in our blood. â€¦ Our brains and nervous systems did not suddenly spring into existence without long antecedents in natural history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity - our extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels - can be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Spring #Ocean #Journey
I am puzzled by people today who, after moralizing about the need for cooperation and goodwill and love-thy-neighbor-as-thyself, suddenly invoke the most primitive, barbarous motivations for any kind of progress.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Motivation #People #Progress
Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.
-- Murray Bookchin

#Reality #Desire #Revolution

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