Quotes from Emma Goldman

To-night I am to be shot because I had once acquired an education.

ON THE night of December 21, 1919, together with two hundred and forty-eight other political prisoners, I was deported from America. Although it was generally known we were to be deported, few really believed that the United States would so completely deny her past as an asylum for political refugees, some of whom had lived and worked in America for more than thirty years.

So long as discontent and unrest make themselves but dumbly felt within a limited social class, the powers of reaction may often succeed in suppressing such manifestations. But when the dumb unrest grows into conscious expression and becomes almost universal, it necessarily affects all phases of human thought and action, and seeks its individual and social expression in the gradual transvaluation of existing values.

Le patriotisme […] est une superstition créée artificiellement et entretenue par tout un réseau de mensonges et de faussetés ; une superstition qui enlève à l'homme tout respect pour lui-même et toute dignité, et accroît son arrogance et son mépris. En effet, mépris, arrogance et égoïsme sont les trois éléments fondamentaux du patriotisme.

How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance

En qué creo es algo más bien cambiante antes que algo irreversible. Lo definitivo es para los dioses y los gobiernos, no para la inteligencia humana.

I believed in God; but when I saw so great an inequality between men, I acknowledged that it was not God who created man, but man who created God.

The Communist dogma that the end justifies all means was also doing much harm. It had thrown the door wide open to the worst human passions, and discredited the ideals of the Revolution. The

Cardinal Manning: Necessity knows no law, and the starving man has a natural right to a share of his neighbor's bread.

God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began.

But what are normal demands to an abnormal institution?

In fact, there is hardly a modern thinker who does not agree that government, organized authority, or the State, is necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only.

Love needs no protection; it is its own protection.

Anarchism, more than any other social theory, values human life above things. All Anarchists agree with Tolstoy in this fundamental truth: if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do without that life. That, however, nowise indicates that Anarchism teaches submission. How can it, when it knows that all suffering, all misery, all ills, result from the evil of submission?

Publishers, theatrical managers, and critics ask not for the quality inherent in creative art, but will it meet with a good sale, will it suit the palate of the people? Alas, this palate is like a dumping ground; it relishes anything that needs no mental mastication. As a result, the mediocre, the ordinary, the commonplace represents the chief literary output.

Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of originality, and the interest in, or desire for, the things he is making

A rock on which the highest hopes are shattered. Life thwarts the best intentions and breaks the finest spirits," she said.

The field had to be "cleared of disturbing elements," and the Anarchists were the first to suffer. Since then the persecution of the Anarchists has never ceased.

But as to free speech," he remarked, "that is, of course, a bourgeois notion. There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period. We

That every act of political violence should nowadays be attributed to Anarchists is not at all surprising. Yet it is a fact known to almost everyone familiar with the Anarchist movement that a great number of acts, for which Anarchists had to suffer, either originated with the capitalist press or were instigated, if not directly perpetrated, by the police.

To inculcate Catholicism in the mind of the child until it is nine years of age is to ruin it forever for any other idea

Discipline and restraint — are they not back of all the evils in the world? Slavery, submission, poverty, all misery, all social iniquities result from discipline and restraint.

Le véritable communisme - l'égalité économique entre les hommes et entre les communautés - exige que chaque communauté organise la planification la meilleure et la plus efficace, en se fondant sur ses nécessités et possibilités locales (...) le communisme est nécessairement libertaire. Anarchiste.

Experience has come to be considered the best school of life. The man or woman who does not learn some vital lesson in that school is looked upon as a dunce indeed.