Quotes from Emma Goldman

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

Mankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods; nothing but pain and persecution have been man's lot since gods began.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Morality and its victim, the mother - what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?

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

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

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.

Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.

Leo Tolstoy ... defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.

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

so few people realize that preparedness never leads to peace, but that it is indeed the road to universal slaughter.

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.

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.

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.

Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.

The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.

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

Corruption of politics has nothing to do with the morals, or the laxity of morals, of various political personalities. Its cause is altogether a material one.

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

There's never been a good government.