Emma Goldman Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Emma Goldman quotes, sayings and quotations 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. — Emma Goldman

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

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

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

Love is it's own protection. — Emma Goldman

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

Politicians promise you heaven before election and give you hell after — Emma Goldman

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

People only have as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.
-Emma Goldman — Sophia Amoruso

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

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

So few people realize that preparedness never leads to peace, but that it is indeed the road to universal slaughter. — Emma Goldman

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

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

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

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

Methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. — Emma Goldman

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

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

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. — Emma Goldman

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. — Emma Goldman

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. — Emma Goldman

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

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

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

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

The keynote of government is injustice. — Emma Goldman

Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another. — Emma Goldman

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

Revolution is but thought carried into action. — Emma Goldman

Resistance to tyranny is man's highest ideal. — Emma Goldman

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

Industry is the ceaseless piracy of the rich against the poor. — Emma Goldman

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

Every society has the criminals it deserves. — Emma Goldman

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

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

If elections really changed anything, they would be outlawed. — Emma Goldman

All unnatural unions which are not hallowed by love are prostitution. — Emma Goldman

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

Lack of fairness to an opponent is essentially a sign of weakness. — Emma Goldman

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

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

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! — Emma Goldman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When we can't dream any longer we die. — Emma Goldman

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

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

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

There's never been a good government. — Emma Goldman

Life without an ideal is spiritual death. — Emma Goldman

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

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. — Emma Goldman

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. — Emma Goldman

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. — Emma Goldman

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

Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. — Emma Goldman

The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism. — Emma Goldman

The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather understand one another. — Emma Goldman

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

The most violent element in society is ignorance. — Emma Goldman

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

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought. — Emma Goldman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understand one another. — Emma Goldman

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

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. — Emma Goldman

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. — Emma Goldman

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

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. — Emma Goldman

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

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

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

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. — Emma Goldman

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

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. — Emma Goldman

If I can not dance, I want no part in your revolution. — Emma Goldman

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

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

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

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

Patriotism is a menace to liberty. — Emma Goldman

Direct action is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism. — Emma Goldman

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

Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world. — Emma Goldman

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

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