Emma Goldman quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Emma Goldman on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.

A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.

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

Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one

Love is it's own protection.

Religion and morality are a much better whip to keep people in submission than even the club and the gun.

Politicians promise you heaven before election and give you hell after

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

Out of the chaos the future emerges in harmony and beauty.

Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.

The majority represent a mass of cowards, willing to accept him who mirror its own soul and mind poverty.

It is organized violence on the top which creates individual violence at the bottom

True emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in the courts. It begins in woman's soul.

Art is a part of the rebellion against the realities of its unfulfilled desire.

Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be.

Methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim.

The government will ... go on in the highly democratic method of conscripting American manhood for European slaughter.

[M]an has as much liberty as he is willing to take.

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.

To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.

Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.

Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor?

The function of militarism is to kill. It cannot live except through murder.

It is significant that whenever the public mind is to be diverted from great social wrong, a crusade is inaugurated against indecency.

I may be arrested, I may be tried and thrown into jail, but I never will be silent.

The keynote of government is injustice.

Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.

All unnatural unions which are not hallowed by love are prostitution.

If elections really changed anything, they would be outlawed.

The State is a term for the legislative and administrative machinery whereby certain business of the people is transacted, and badly so.

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.

When we can't dream any longer we die.

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.

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

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

Life without an ideal is spiritual death.

Resistance to tyranny is man's highest ideal.

The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass.

There's never been a good government.

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

Anarchism ... stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral.

Pettiness separates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big.

In modern capitalism economic exploitation rather than political oppression is the real enemy of the people.

It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance" that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.

The benefits brought to the Russian people by Bolshevism exist only on paper painted in glowing colors by Bolshevist propaganda.

To call the State an organism shows a diseased tendency to make a fetish of words.

So long as tyranny exists, in whatever form, man's deepest aspiration must resist it as inevitably as man must breathe.

Revolution is but thought carried into action.

The majority cares little for ideals and integrity. What it craves is display.

Readiness,' far far from assuring peace, has at all times and in all countries been instrumental in precipitating armed conflicts.

Let us not overlook vital things, because of the bulk of trifles confronting us.

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.

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

True, the movement for women's rights has broken many old fetters, but it has also forged new ones.

All claims of education notwithstanding, the pupil will accept only that which his mind craves.

Salvation lies in an energetic march onward towards a brighter and clearer future.

Prison, a social protection? What monstrous mind ever conceived such an idea? Just as well say that health can be promoted by a widespread contagion!

Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.

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

The most violent element in society is ignorance.

We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America.

Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.

All government, whatever its forms or pretenses, is a dead weight that paralyzes the free spirit and activities of the masses.

People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.

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

The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism.

Militarism consumes the strongest and most productive elements of each nation. Militarism swallows the largest part of the national revenue.

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

Direct action is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.

Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in.

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.

More pernicious than the power of a dictator is that of a class; the most terrible - the tyranny of a majority.

The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.

Understand one another.

[Woman's] life-long economic parasitism has utterly blurred her conception of the meaning of equality.

If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.

'What I believe' is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect.

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

The American suffrage movement has been, until very recently, altogether a parlor affair, absolutely detached from the economic needs of the people.

Nothing satisfies the craving of most women so much as scandal.

Industry is the ceaseless piracy of the rich against the poor.

If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right!

Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society.

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.

Prostitution, although hounded, imprisoned, and chained, is nevertheless the greatest triumph of Puritanism.

Christ and his teachings are the embodiment of submission, of inertia, of the denial of life; hence responsible for the things done in their name.

To-day is the parent of to-morrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future.

There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can't be.

Every society has the criminals it deserves.

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.

Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage. Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.

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.

Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.

One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; the extreme thing is generally the true thing.

Democracy must first be safe for America before it can be safe for the world.

The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings as in his native land.

After all, that is what laws are for, to be made and unmade.

Patriotism is a menace to liberty.