Emma Goldman, (1869-1940), American Anarchist Quotes

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

In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, however, a woman's premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, "until death doth part.

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.

…The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism.

How is a military drilled and trained to defend freedom, peace and happiness? This is what Major General O'Ryan has to say of an efficiently trained generation: ‘The soldier must be so trained that he becomes a mere automoton; he must be so trained that it will destroy his initiative; he must be so trained that he is turned into a machine. The soldier must be forced into the military noose; he must be jacked up; he must be ruled by his superiors with pistol in hand.' This was not said by a Prussian Junker; not by a German barbarian… but by an American major general. And he is right. You cannot conduct war with equals; you cannot have militarism with free born men; you must have slaves, automotons, machines, obedient disciplined creatures, who will move, act, shoot and kill at the command of their superiors. That is preparedness, and nothing else.

Patriotism is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a web of lies and falsehoods, robbing us of our dignity and increasing our arrogance and conceit.

Patriotism is a menace to liberty.

Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man.

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

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