Quotes from Pyotr Kropotkin

All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate everyone's part in the production of the world's wealth.

No more of such vague formulae as 'The right to work', or 'To each the whole result of his labour'. What we proclaim is the Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All!

Whence will the revolution come? How will it announce its coming? No one can answer these questions. The future is hidden. But those who watch and think do not misinterpret the signs: workers and exploiters, revolutionists and conservatives, thinkers and men of action, all feel that a revolution is at our doors.

Nothing yet has been accomplished Meanwhile the people suffer. The factories are idle, the workshops closed; industry is at a standstill. The worker does not even earn the meagre wage which was his before. Food goes up in price. With that heroic devotion which has always characterized them, and which in great crises reaches the sublime, the people wait patiently.

In olden times, when a king sent his vogt to a village, the peasants received him with flowers in one hand, and arms in the other, and asked him--which law he intended to apply: the one he found in the village, or the one he brought with him?

The "right to well-being" means the possibility of living like human beings, and of bringing up children to be members of a society better than ours, whilst the "right to work" only means the right to be always a wage-slave, a drudge, ruled over and exploited by the middle class of the future.

The right to well-being is the Social Revolution, the right to work means nothing but the Treadmill of Commercialism.

We must take possession, in the name of the people, of the granaries, the shops full of clothing, and the dwelling-houses. Nothing must be wasted. We must organize without delay a way to feed the hungry, to satisfy all wants, to meet all needs, to produce not for the special benefit of this one or that one, but so as to ensure to society as a whole its life and further development.

And we say, 'Down with the privileges of education, as well as those of birth!' We are anarchists precisely because these privileges revolt us. They revolt us already in this authoritarian society. Could we endure them in a society that began by proclaiming equality?

As seen from the above, the war of each against all is not the law of nature. Mutual aid is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle, and that law will become still more apparent when we have analyzed some other associations of birds and those

By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say--This is mine, not yours?

When you go into a public library - not indeed the National Library of Paris, but, say, into the British Museum or the Berlin Library - the librarian does not ask what services you have rendered to society before giving you the book, or the fifty books, which you require; he even comes to your assistance if you do not know how to manage the catalogue.

To emancipate woman is not only to open the gates of the university, the law courts or the parliaments to her, for the 'emancipated' woman will always throw domestic toil on to another woman. To emancipate woman is to free her from the brutalizing toil of the kitchen and wash-house; it is to organize your household in such a way as to enable her to rear her children, if she be so minded, while retaining sufficient leisure to take her share of social life.

We can already catch glimpses of a world in which the bonds which bind the individual are no longer laws, but social habits - the result of the need felt by each one of us to seek the support, the co-operation, the sympathy of his neighbours.

we know that every alleviation, however slight, of the wretchedness of our great cities is followed by a very considerable diminution of crime;

The man who does not feel the slightest remorse when poisoning his customers with noxious drugs covered with pompous labels, thinks he is in honour bound to keep his engagements. But if this relative morality has developed under present conditions, when enrichment is the only incentive and the only aim, can we doubt its rapid progress when appropriation of the fruits of others' labour will no longer be the basis of society?

What fatherland can the international banker and rag-picker have in common?

the strength of anarchy lies precisely in that it understands all human faculties and all passions , and ignores none

We are beginning to see that government by majorities means abandoning all the affairs of the country to the tide-waiters who make up the majorities in the House and in election committees; to those, in a word, who have no opinion of their own.

Every economic phase has a political phase corresponding to it, and it would be impossible to touch private property unless a new mode of political life be found at the same time.

It is in order to obtain for all of us joys that are now reserved to a few; in order to give leisure and the possibility of developing everyone's intellectual capacities, that the social revolution must guarantee daily bread to all. After bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim.

We accustom ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to the practice of a double-faced morality. And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselves with sophistry. Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the civilized man.

The coming Revolution can render no greater service to humanity than to make the wage system, in all its forms, an impossibility, and to render Communism, which is the negation of wage-slavery, the only possible solution.

Nine-tenths of the great fortunes made in the United States are (as Henry George has shown in his Social Problems) the result of knavery on a large scale, assisted by the state.