Emma Goldman Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Emma Goldman on Wise Famous Quotes.
The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.
Religion and morality are a much better whip to keep people in submission than even the club and the gun.
The majority represent a mass of cowards, willing to accept him who mirror its own soul and mind poverty.
Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be.
The government will ... go on in the highly democratic method of conscripting American manhood for European slaughter.
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?
It is significant that whenever the public mind is to be diverted from great social wrong, a crusade is inaugurated against indecency.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So long as tyranny exists, in whatever form, man's deepest aspiration must resist it as inevitably as man must breathe.
Readiness,' far far from assuring peace, has at all times and in all countries been instrumental in precipitating armed conflicts.
The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.
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.
We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America.
All government, whatever its forms or pretenses, is a dead weight that paralyzes the free spirit and activities of the masses.
The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.
Militarism consumes the strongest and most productive elements of each nation. Militarism swallows the largest part of the national revenue.
Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in.
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.
[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.
The American suffrage movement has been, until very recently, altogether a parlor affair, absolutely detached from the economic needs of the people.
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.
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.
One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; the extreme thing is generally the true thing.