Quotes from Pyotr Kropotkin

All is interdependent in a civilized society; it is impossible to reform any one thing without altering the whole. Therefore, on the day a nation will strike at private property, under any one of its forms, territorial or industrial, it will be obliged to attack them all. The very success of the revolution will impose it.

We have the temerity to declare that all have a right to bread, that there is bread enough for all, and that with this watchword of Bread for All the revolution will triumph.

Give the people a free hand, and in ten days the food service will be conducted with admirable regularity. Only those who have never seen the people hard at work, only those who have passed their lives buried among documents, can doubt it.

In a word, the system is this: no stint or limit to what the community possesses in abundance, but equal sharing and dividing of those commodities which are scarce or apt to run short.

Statists] forget to prove to us that it is possible to put an end to exploitation while the primal causes - private capital and poverty, two-thirds of which are artificially created by the state - continue to exist.

as long as there are capitalists, these abuses of power will be perpetuated. It is precisely the state, the would-be benefactor, that has given to the companies that monopoly and those rights upon us which they possess today... has it not sent its soldiers against railwaymen on strike?

The mitigated individualism of the collectivist system certainly could not maintain itself alongside a partial communism

As to other countries, revolution would break out everywhere, but revolution under divers aspects; in one country state socialism, in another federation; everywhere more or less socialism, not conforming to any particular rule.

As long as worthless paper-money - whether called assignats or labour notes - is offered to the peasant-producer it will always be the same. The country will withhold its produce, and the towns will suffer want, even if the recalcitrant peasants are guillotined as before. We must offer to the peasant in exchange for his toil not worthless paper-money, but the manufactured articles of which he stands in immediate need.

To Engineers And you, young engineer, who dream of bettering the lot of the workers by applying the inventions of science to industry, what a sad disenchantment, what deceptions await you. You

The bold thought first, and the bold deed will not fail to follow.

Un cristiano, un asceta, pueden reprobar esos deseos de lujo, pero, en realidad, tales bagatelas son precisamente las que rompen la monotonía de la existencia y la hacen agradable. ¿La vida valdría la pena de ser vivida, con todas sus inevitables tristezas, si el hombre no pudiera, fuera del trabajo, procurarse un solo placer de acuerdo con sus gustos individuales?

La revolución tiene que garantizar a cada uno el pan cotidiano, para asegurar al mismo tiempo esas satisfacciones, reservadas hoy a un pequeño número de personas: el tener tiempo libre luego del trabajo y el poder desarrollar sus capacidades intelectuales. El tiempo libre después del pan: he aquí el supremo objetivo.

There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present

All things for all.

Each religious morality sanctifies its prescriptions by making them originate from revelation; and it tries to impress its teachings on the mind by a promise of reward, or punishment, either in this or in a future life.

Equality in all things, the synonym of equity, this is anarchism in very deed. It is not only against the abstract trinity of law, religion, and authority that we declare war. By becoming anarchists we declare war against all this wave of deceit, cunning, exploitation, depravity, vice—in a word, inequality—which they have poured into all our hearts. We declare war against their way of acting, against their way of thinking.

What we proclaim is The Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All!

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!

Alguien ha dicho que el polvo es la materia que no está en su sitio. La misma definición se aplica a las nueve décimas de los llamados perezosos.

If the present situation should continue much longer, the very word 'socialism' will turn into a curse, as did the slogan of 'equality' for forty years after the rule of the Jacobins. —letter to Lenin, March 1920

Society is thus bound to remain divided into two hostile camps, and in such conditions freedom is a vain word.

Las letras y las ciencias no tomarán su verdadero lugar en la obra del desarrollo humano hasta el día en que, libres de toda servidumbre mercenaria, sean exclusivamente cutivadas por los que la aman y para aquellos que las aman.

If all the men and women in the countryside had their daily bread assured, and their daily needs already satisfied, who would work for our capitalist at a wage of half a crown a day, while the commodities one produces in a day sell in the market for a crown or more?