Quotes About Anarchism

Vast organisations produce a sense of impotence in the individual, leading to a decay of effort. The danger can be averted if it is realised by administrators, but it is of a kind which most administrators are constitutionally incapable of realising. Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism, enough to prevent immobility leading to decay, but not enough to bring about disruption.

But anarchism has become fashionable, especially among refugees from the left who don't understand that anarchism isn't a sexier version of leftism, it is what it is, it is something else entirely, it is just anarchism and it is post-leftist.

Anarchism means all sort of things to different people, but the traditional anarchists' movements assumed that there'd be a highly organized society, just one organized from below with direct participation and so on.

Property being theft and all, I felt free to help myself.

Emma Goldman.

For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between State Socialism and Anarchism.

Direct action is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.

In ordinary times, the center always wins. Its power grows with time, and that can't be reversed, not by ordinary means. Decentralizing, back toward anarchism, needs extraordinary times... This War--this incredible War--just for the moment has wiped out the proliferation of little states that's prevailed in Germany for a thousand years. Wiped it clean. Opened it.

If I were pressed to give my brand of political thought a label, I would call it pessimistic anarchistic quietism, or anarchistic quietistic pessimism or pessimistic quietistic anarchism: anarchism because experience tells me that what is wrong with politics is power itself; quietism because I have my doubts about the will to set about changing the world, a will infected with the drive to power; and pessimism because I am sceptical that, in a fundamental way, things can be changed.

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

If all our comrades of Europe, America and other countries, who do not understand what we are doing to Spanish Anarchism, would come to Spain, we could then see how they would react.

Is anarchism desirable? Well, who does not seek freedom? What man, unless willing to declare himself in bondage, would care to call any control agreeable? Think about it!

All good men are anarchists. All cultured, kindly men; all gentlemen; all just men are anarchists. Jesus was an anarchist.

There was only one earth, and the quantity of material things was limited. Of intellectual and moral things, on the other hand, there was no limit, and one could have more without another's having less; hence Communism in material production, anarchism in intellectual, was the formula of modern proletarian thought. As

While the popular understanding of anarchism is of a violent, anti-State movement, anarchism is a much more subtle and nuanced tradition then a simple opposition to government power. Anarchists oppose the idea that power and domination are necessary for society, and instead advocate more co-operative, anti-hierarchical forms of social, political and economic organisation.

In short, Anarchism means a condition or society where all men and women are free, and where all enjoy equally the benefits of an ordered and sensible life.

Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony.

The rights of property are in less jeopardy from the Socialists and the Anarchists than from the predatory man of wealth…

Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. This justification does not succeed most of the time.

The core of the anarchist tradition, as I understand it, is that power is always illegitimate, unless it proves itself to be legitimate. So the burden of proof is always on those who claim that some authoritarian hierarchic relation is legitimate. If they can't prove it, then it should be dismantled.

For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account.

But much more to my taste, at least, are quite different tendencies, for example, that range of opinion that extends roughly from Rosa Luxemburg and the Dutch Marxist Anton Pannekoek and Paul Mattick to the anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker and others.

In my opinion the immediate goal of even committed anarchists should be to defend some state institutions, while helping to pry them open to more meaningful public participation, and ultimately to dismantle them in a much more free society.

Anarchism is necessarily anti-capitalist in that it "opposes the exploitation of man by man.