Quotes from Emma Goldman

Idealists foolish enough to throw caution to the winds have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.

The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved.

When we can't dream any longer we die.

Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass

Patriotism is a menace to liberty.

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

Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one's self-respect.

Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one's self-respect. For jealous people, like dope-fiends, stoop to the lowest level and in the end inspire only disgust and loathing.

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

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?

No one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy, kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.

No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution... revolution is but thought carried into action.

If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution.

The keynote of government is injustice.

The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.

Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.

Free love? as if love is anything but free. Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love.

If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.

Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the shackles and restraints of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth.

The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.

The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?... With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

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

To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.

The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being.