Our Daily Bleed...
Our Daily Bleed...
173177 quotes & growing...THIS PAGE ALWAYS UNDER CONSTRUCTION. Thanks for your patience!
Jean Baudrillard, French philosopher (1929-)
The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.
If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it.
Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.
We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.
It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it operating like a video game...All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughs unfolding before us – and this itself is a superstition.
--Anarchist Quotes: Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka,
(1883-1924). Czech lawyer & novelist whose anarchist influences & ideas find an aesthetic, rather than political, embodiment.
"The Revolution evaporates, & leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. The chains of tormented mankind are made out of red tape."
— Franz Kafka
Kafka illustration by Flavio Costantini
--Anarchist Quotes: Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen, dramatist
"The State is the curse of the individual. . . The State must go! That will be a revolution which will find me on its side. Undermine the idea of the State, set up in its place spontaneous action, and the idea that spiritual relationship is the only thing that makes for unity, and you will start the elements of a liberty which will be something worth possessing."Emma Goldman The Social Significance of the Modern Drama
--Anarchist Quotes: Thomas Paine
"Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins ... Society is in every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
--- Thomas Paine, Common Sense; forgotten American & revolutionary whose remains are lost
--Anarchist Quotes: Sacco & Vanzetti
This appeared in The Industrial Worker (Spokane, Seattle Aug. 20, 1927)
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested outside Boston in 1920 and charged with robbing and killing a shoe factory paymaster and his guard. Though a prosecutor insisted they would be tried for murder and "nothing else," their radical politics remained a focus of the 1921 trial. Judge Webster Thayer, whose bias against the two men surfaced repeatedly, denied the first motion for a new trial in October 1924. In the years that followed he would deny five other motions. In late 1925, new evidence surfaced that gave the Sacco-Vanzetti defense new grounds for an appeal: a convicted murderer told Sacco he committed the South Braintree murders. But Thayer again denied the motion for a new trial, finding that the confession was untruthful. The battle to save Sacco and Vanzetti ended when they were executed in the electric chair on August 23, 1927.
In the months leading up to the execution, every issue of the Industrial Worker contained an update on the two including calls for strikes, editorials on the trials and the authorities involved, and even comments by the convicted anarchists. One of the most moving pieces is a poem by the two, called "Last Will":
Prologue:
We, Sacco and Vanzetti, sound of body and mind,
Devise and bequeath to all we leave behind,
The worldly wealth we inherited at our birth,
Each one to share alike as we leave this earth.To Wit:
To babies we will their mothers’ love,
To youngsters we will the sun above.
To spooners who wont to tryst the night,
We give the moon and stars that shine so bright.
To thrill them in their hours of joy,
When boy hugs maid and maid hugs boy.
To nature’s creatures we allot the spring and summer,
To the doe, the bear, the gold-finch and the hummer.
To the fishes we ascribe the deep blue sea,
The honey we apportion to the bustling bee.
To the pessimist—good cheer—his mind to sooth,
To the chronic liar we donate the solemn truth.And Lastly:
To those who judge solely seeking renown,
With blaring trumpets of the fakir and clown;
To the prosecutor, persecutor, and other human hounds,
Who’d barter another’s honor, recognizing no bounds,
To the Governor, the Jury, who another’s life they’d sell—
We endow them with the fiery depths of HELL!(Indust. Wrkr., Aug. 20, 1927)In the issue after the execution there was a full page memorial to the two fallen martyrs. It contained a final editorial on the trial and the last message written by Vanzetti.
--Anarchist Quotes: Edward Abbey, anarchist
— Ed Abbey
--Anarchist Quotes: Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky American critic
"If the Nuremberg laws were applied today, then every Post-War American president would have to be hanged."
— Noam Chomsky
--‘In History, stagnant waters, whether they be the stagnant waters of custom or those of despotism, harbour no life; life is dependent on the ripples created by a few eccentric individuals. In homage to that life & vitality, the community has to brave certain perils & must countenance a measure of heresy. One must live dangerously if one wants to live at all.’
— Herbert Read, art critic, anarchist beknighted by the Queen of England
anarchist
--
"Freedom without Socialism is privilege & injustice, & Socialism without freedom is slavery & brutality"
— Mikhail Bakunin
"No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world.
I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker."
--
The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, & not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.— Mikhail Bakunin, God & the State
--
"No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world.
I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker."
— Mikhail Bakunin
--"Our destiny is to arrive at that state of ideal perfection where nations no longer have any need to be under the tutelage of a government or any other nation. It is the absence of government; it is anarchy, the highest expression of order."
— Elisée Reclus
anarchist
--Anarchist Quotes: Edward Abbey
Anarchist Quotes: Ed Abbey
Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, & county commissioners."
— Edward Abbey
--
""The state calls its own violence law, & that of the individual, crime."— Max Stirner
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/gallery/galleryindex.htm#Stirner
--"I am an Anarchist not because I believe Anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal."
— Rudolf Rocker, The London Years
--The individual who dares commit a crime is guilty in a two-fold sense; first, he is guilty against human conscience, &, above all, he is guilty against the State in arrogating to himself one of its most precious privileges.
-- American anarchist cultural critic Paul Goodman dies. Wrote Growing Up Absurd."A free society cannot be the substitution of a new order for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up the most of social life."
"I move in a society so devoid of ordinary reality that I am continually stopping to teach good sense, to give support, to help out, as a young gangster might help an old lady across the street on his way to the stick-up."
How well they flew together side by side
the Stars & Stripes my red & white & blue
& my Black Flag the sovereignty of no
man or law!— Paul Goodman,
in Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State
"It is by losing ourselves in inquiry, creation & craft that we become something. Civilization is a continual gift of spirit: inventions, discoveries, insight, art. We are citizens, as Socrates would have said, & we have it available as our own. "
— Paul Goodman
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/gallery/galleryindex.htm#GoodmanPaul
"Do not jump into your automobile next June & rush out to the canyon country ... In the first place, you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the god-damned contraption & walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone & through the thornbush & cactus.
When traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you'll see something, maybe. Probably not. In the second place, most of what I write about in this book is already gone or going fast.
This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You're holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don't drop it on your foot — throw it at something big & glassy. What have you got to lose?"
— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
"Everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol & combination of symbols led not hither & yon, not to single examples, experiments, & proofs, but into the center, the mystery & innermost heart of the world"---Hermann Hesse
"I mock thee not, though I by thee am mockéd.
Thou call'st me madman, but I call thee blockhead"— William Blake
"I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I needed it"— John Cage
Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience & through rebellion.
— Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism,
in "Fortnightly Review" (London, Feb. 1891; reprinted. 1895)
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at.
— Oscar Wilde
"Oh fuck, now I'll miss the summer school."
— Robert Lynn's last words
[ Lynn (1924-1997) Scottish anarchist who initiated a number of events, especially the Glasgow Anarchist Summer School which now attracts libertarian socialists from all over Britain.Lynn died just before the 1997 school was to begin]
"The people have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want & the courage to take."
— Emma Goldman
"If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution."
"When I was 15 I suffered from unrequited love, & I wanted to commit suicide in a romantic way . . . but at 16 I decided on a more exalted death.I wanted to dance myself to death."
— Emma Goldman, Speech Before The Foyle's
29th Literary Luncheon, March 1, 1933
http://www.gis.net/~scatt/anarchy.html
When we can't dream any longer we die.— Emma Goldman
"All things for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men worked to produce them in the measure of their strength, and since it is not possible to evaluate everyone's part in the production of the world's wealth... All is for all!"
"But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a moldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children?"
"In order that the revolution should be something more than a word, in order that the reaction should not lead us back tomorrow to the situation of yesterday, the conquest of today must be worth the trouble of defending; the poor of yesterday must be worth the trouble of defending; the poor of yesterday must not be poor tomorrow."
"Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none."
"Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin], your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold."
"Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle... mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle."
"The two great movements of our century --towards Liberty of the individual and social co-operation of the whole community--are summed up in Anarchist-Communism."
"[U]nless Socialists are prepared openly and avowedly to profess that the satisfaction of the needs of each individual must be their very first aim; unless they have prepared public opinion to establish itself firmly at this standpoint, the people in their next attempt to free themselves will once more suffer a defeat."
How well they flew together side by side
the Stars & Stripes my red & white & blue
& my Black Flag the sovereignty of no
man or law!
— Paul Goodman, in Noam Chomsky,
For Reasons of Stateanarchist
Emma Goldman
http://www.acm.jhu.edu/pipermail/band-alum/2000-December/000049.html
-- Leon Czolgosz (1873-1901) [Bass-baritone]: Son of newly arrived Polish immigrants. He was a full-time laborer by age 12 (first in a glass factory, later in a wire mill). Attended a number of Anarchist rallies & had a brief meeting with Anarchist Emma Goldman. Assassinated President William McKinley, September 6, 1901, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY. "I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people -- the good working people. I done my duty." http://www2.potsdam.edu/grahamcr/opera/Assassins.htm
-- "The slave is always in a state of legitimate defence & consequently, his violence against the Boss, against the oppressor, is always justifiable, & must be controlled only by such considerations as that the best & most economical use is being made of human effort & human sufferings."
|
 |
|
|
The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, & not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.
— Mikhail Bakunin, God & the State
It seems unbelievable that even today, after everything that has happened & is happening in Russia, there are people who still imagine that the difference between socialists & anarchists is only that of wanting revolution gradually or quickly.
|
 |
"Three-fourths of philosophy & literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering." — Gary Snyder, Zen Anarchist Poet |
Our present laws protect the rich from the poor.If there are to be laws, we need ones that Begin with the acceptance of poverty as a way of life.
We must make the world safe for poverty Without dependence on government."
— John Cage
|
"Language is a virus..."
& how they function.
They become images when written down,
but images of words repeated in the mind
& not of the image of the thing itself." --- Billy Burroughs |
Ferdinand Gambon, French lawyer, magistrate, initially moderate republican, became a socialist, anarchist & pacifist revolutionary. Defense lawyer for the Lyons anarchists in the 1883 trials.
Coined the famous pacifist slogan "War Against War!". See the Anarchist Encyclopedia page,
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/FerdinandGambon.htm
--
| Emma Goldman (1869-1940)
Russian-American anarchist, writer, publisher; eventually deported to Russia
The worker who knows the cause of his misery, who understands the make-up of our iniquitous social and industrial system can do more for himself and his kind than Christ and the followers of Christ have ever done for humanity; certainly more than meek patience, ignorance, and submission have done.
I was called before the head matron, a tall woman with a stolid face. She began taking my pedigree. "What religion?" was the first question. "None, I am an atheist." "Atheism is prohibited here. You will have to go to church." I replied that I would do nothing of the kind. I did not believe in anything the Church stood for and, not being a hypocrite, I would not attend.
I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years past been working to undo the botched job your God has made.
How to raise this dead level of theistic belief is really a matter of life and death for all denominations. Therefore their tolerance; but it is a tolerance not of understanding; but of weakness.
It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance" that no one really
cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.
Redemption through the Cross is worse than damnation, because of the terrible burden it imposes upon humanity, because of the effect it has on the human soul, fettering and paralyzing it with the weight of the burden exacted through the death of Christ.
Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race. Confucius cares not for the poverty, squalor and misery of the people of China. Buddha remains undisturbed in his philosophical indifference to the famine and starvation of outraged Hindoos; Jahve continues deaf to the bitter cry of Israel; while Jesus refuses to rise from the dead against his Christians who are butchering each other.
There are ... some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and Bigotry -- the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth.
The burden of all song and praise "unto the Highest" has been that God stands for justice and mercy. Yet injustice among men is ever on the increase; the outrages committed against the masses in this country alone would seem enough to overflow the very heavens. But where are the gods to make an end to all these horrors, these wrongs, this inhumanity to man? No, not the gods, but MAN must rise in his mighty wrath. He, deceived by all the deities, betrayed by their emissaries, he, himself, must undertake to usher in justice upon the earth. Do not all theists insist that there can be no morality, no justice, honesty or fidelity without the belief in a Divine Power? Based upon fear and hope, such morality has always been a vile product, imbued partiy with self-righteousness, partly with hypocrisy. As to truth, justice, and fidelity, who have been their brave exponents and daring proclaimers? Nearly always the godless ones: the Atheists; they lived, fought, and died for them. They knew that justice, truth, and fidelity are not conditioned in heaven, but that they are related to and interwoven with the tremendous changes going on in the social and material life of the human race; not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating, even as life itself. Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it. "Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven."
Atheism ... in its philosophic
aspect refuses allegiance not merely to a definite concept of God, but
it refuses all servitude to the God idea, and opposes the theistic principle
as such. Gods in their individual function are not half as pernicious as
the principle of theism which represents the belief in a supernatural,
or even omnipotent, power to rule the earth and man upon it. It is the
absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing
effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its
power. So weak and helpless was this "Savior of Men" that he must needs the whole human family to pay for him, unto all eternity, because he "hath died for them." Redemption through the Cross is worse than damnation, because of the terrible burden it imposes upon humanity, because of the effect it has on the human soul, fettering and paralyzing it with the weight of the burden exacted through the death of Christ. It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality. The abuses of Christianity, like the abuses of government, are conditioned in the thing itself, and are not to be charged to the representatives of the creed. 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.
I am not interested in the theological Christ. Brilliant minds like Bauer, Strauss, Renan, Thomas Paine, and others refuted that myth long ago. I am even ready to admit that the theological Christ is not half so dangerous as the ethical and social Christ. In proportion as science takes the place of blind faith, theology loses its hold. But the ethical and poetical Christ-myth has so thoroughly saturated our lives that even some of the most advanced minds find it difficult to emancipate themselves from its yoke. They have rid themselves of the letter, but have retained the spirit; yet it is the spirit which is back of all the crimes and horrors committed by orthodox Christianity. The Fathers of the Church can well afford to preach the gospel of Christ. It contains nothing dangerous to the regime of authority and wealth; it stands for self-denial and self-abnegation, for penance and regret, and is absolutely inert in the face of every [in]dignity, every outrage imposed upon mankind.
The God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events. 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. Imagine, capitalist America also divides the anarchists into two categories, philosophic and criminal. The first are accepted in highest circles; one of them is even high in the councils of the Wilson Administration. The second category, to which we have the honor of belonging, is persecuted and often imprisoned. Yours also seems to be a distinction without a difference. Don't you think so?
Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage? |
Biographical sketches, source citations, notes, critical editing, layout, and HTML formatting are copyright © 1996-2002, by Cliff Walker. editor@positiveatheism.org
"We are men without God, without Masters & Fatherland, irreconcilable enemies of any despotism, moral or collective, i.e. laws & dictatorships (including that of the proletariat), & impassioned lovers of the culture of oneself ".
"I have seen capital come, like a vampire, to suck the last drop of blood of the unfortunate pariahs. Then I came back to France where it was reserved for me to see my family suffer atrociously. This was the last drop in the cup of my sorrow. Tired of leading this life of suffering and cowardice I carried this bomb to those who are primarily responsible for social misery".
-- I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect
of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be
dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.
--- Noam Chomsky, interview in May 1995, in "Red & Black Revolution"
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/rbr/noamrbr2.html
-- Divested of his defenses,
man becomes eminently vulnerable to science.
Divested of his phantasies,
he becomes eminently vulnerable to psychology.
Freed of his germs,
he becomes eminently vulnerable to medicine.P>
-Jean Badrillard
Alternative Press Review http://flag.blackened.net/apr/
-- What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? Ursula K. LeGuin
-- As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
Noam Chomsky
All our political forms are exhausted & practically nonexistent. Our parliamentary and electoral system & our political parties are just as futile as dictatorships are intolerable.
Nothing is left. & this nothing is increasingly aggressive, totalitarian, & omnipresent. Our experience today is the strange one of empty political institutions in which no one has any confidence any more, of a system of government which functions only in the interests of a political class, & at the same time of the almost infinite growth of power, authority, & social control which makes any one of our democracies a more authoritarian mechanism than the Napoleonic state.
— Jacques Ellul, Anarchie et Christianisme
"Controlled mediations separate individuals from themselves, their desires, their dreams, & their will to live; & so people come to believe in the legend that you can't do without them, or the power that governs them.Where Power fails to paralyze with constraints, it paralyses by suggestion, by forcing everyone to use crutches of which it is the sole owner & purveyor. Power as the sum of alienating mediations awaits only the holy water of cybernetics to baptize it into the state of Totality.
But total power does not exist, only totalitarian powers. & cyberneticians make such pitiful priests that their baptism of organization will be laughed off the stage."
— Raoul Vaneigem, "Technology & Its Mediated Use"
-- "To the reactionists of today we are revolutionists, but to the revolutionists of tomorrow our acts will have been those of conservatives."
- Ricardo Flores Magon
-- "The future of anarchism must be appraised within a global context; any attempt to localize it is bound to yield a distorted
outcome. The obstacles to anarchism are, in the main, global; only their specifics are determined by local circumstances."
Sam Mbah
-- Anarchism...stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and
moral. -- Emma Goldman
The political arena leaves one no alternatives, one must be either a dunce or a rogue. -- Emma Goldman
Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an
instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both
recreation and hope. -- Emma Goldman
-- If you see a T-shirt that says, "We started off trying to set up a small anarchist
community, but people wouldn't obey the rules," they stole that quote from Alan
Bennett. http://www.adequacy.net/features/view/view60.shtml
--
"Free thought, necessarily involving freedom of speech & press, I may tersely define thus:
no opinion a law — no opinion a crime."
— Alexander Berkman
‘In History, stagnant waters, whether they be the stagnant waters of custom or those of despotism, harbour no life; life is dependent on the ripples created by a few eccentric individuals.
In homage to that life & vitality, the community has to brave certain perils & must countenance a measure of heresy.
One must live dangerously if one wants to live at all.’
— Herbert Read, art critic, anarchist beknighted by the Queen of England
--
"You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit or it is nowhere." — Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
"I have been an anarchist all my life. I hope I have remained one. I should consider it very sad indeed had I to turn
to a General and rule men with a military rod.... I believe, as I always have, in freedom. The freedom which rests
on the sense of responsibility. I consider discipline indispensable, but it must be inner discipline, motivated by a
common purpose and a strong feeling of comradeship.
-- Anarchy is the expression of the liberation of man
from the idols of the state, the church, & capital;
socialism is the expression of the true & genuine
community among men, genuine because it grows
out of the individual spirit.
— Gustav Landauer
|
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."
|
"The very existence of the State demands
that there be some privileged class vitally
interested in maintaining that existence.& it is precisely the group interests
of that class that are called patriotism."
— Michael Bakunin, Letters on Patriotism, 1869.
">Biographical information/links
This quote courtesy of Recollection Used Anarchist Books
"Speak, speak, speak,
& remember that whenever
anyone's liberty to speak is denied,
your liberty is denied also, & your place
is where the attack is.."
— Voltairine De Cleyre [1886-1912].
Biographical information/links
This quote courtesy of Recollection Used Anarchist Books
"The world of 'pop' music & fashion appears like a section through the Spectacle & its spurious opposition. All the elements are there — primarily, it is a show for passive consumption, offering release, but is dressing up in the image of rebellion. It takes the desire for real revolt, contains it, & sells us back its image.
The Spectacle scours proletarian history for symbols of revolt & resistance in order to derail them of all meaning & power. Only then can they be sold back to us as wholesome food.
It is a mark of our own alienation from our own history — the history of people fighting to win back their own lives — that we do not find it absurd, or even offensive, that groups of multinational record company musicians call themselves such names as 'The Communards' or 'The Durruti Column' [sic]. No matter how 'radical' their songs, or 'innovative' their music, we should roll them in manure for their pretentiousness."
— quote cited at Durruti Column web site
"It is the people who will deliver us from the men who have been corrupting us, & the people themselves will win their liberty."
We are free, truly free,
when we don't need to rent
our arms to anybody in
order to be able to lift a
piece of bread to our
mouths.
A psychotic is someone who just found out what's going on.— William S. Burroughs
The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love & nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.
— William Burroughs (b. 1914), U.S. author, Daily Bleed Saint, November 22, 1997. The Job: Interviews with Daniel Odier, Prisoners of the Earth Come Out (1969).
anarchist
"Thanks for a nation of finks.
Thanks for a nation where nobody is allowed to mind their own business."
— Billy Burroughs, exterminator, suspect reprobate, "Thanksgiving"
There are some aliens camped near us in blue denim suits
— Martians I think —
& I visit them.— William S. Burroughs, My Education: A Book of Dreams
"Many people say that
government is necessary
because some men cannot
be trusted to look after
themselves, but anarchists
say that government is
harmful because no men
can be trusted to look after
anyone else." -- Nicolas Walter (1924-2000)
British journalist, philosopher, atheist, anarchist.
"Thanks for a nation of finks.Thanks for a nation where nobody is allowed to mind their own business."
— Billy Burroughs, exterminator, suspect reprobate, "Thanksgiving"
 |
“We can comprehend this world only by contesting it as a whole ... The root of the prevailing lack of imagination cannot be grasped unless one is able to imagine what is lacking, that is, what is missing, hidden, forbidden, & yet possible, in modern life.”
— Situationist International
-- In the republic the State, which is supposed to be the people, legally organized, stifles & will continue to stifle the real
people. But the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled "the people's stick."
— Mikhail Bakunin, Statism & Anarchy, 1873
-- "The professors — those modern priests of licensed political & social quakery -- poison the university youth so effectively it would need a miracle to cure them. By the time a young man is graduated from the university, he has completely become a full-fledged doctrinaire, full of self-conceit & contempt for the rabble, whom he is quite ready to oppress & especially to exploit, in the name of his intellectual & moral superiority."
"Confusion is mightier than the sword."— Abbie Hoffman
Steal this Website, http://www.hayduke.com/
"Sacred cows make the best hamburger."— Abbie Hoffman
-- "If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the anarchists."
(Extract letter, October 1937 written by George Orwell to his friend Jack Common).
--
"The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently."— Gustav Landauer
Cited in the Anarchist Encyclopedia
--
" Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle ... mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle."— Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid
"Where there is authority, there is no freedom."— Prince Peter Kropotkin
"[Anarchism is the] philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, & are therefore wrong & harmful, as well as unnecessary." — Emma Goldman
"Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong."— Oscar Wilde
"You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit or it is nowhere." — Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
-- Let them write their rubbish. These people will never be able to
understand that the student movement doesn't need any chiefs. I
am neither a leader nor a professional revolutionary. I am simply a
mouthpiece, a megaphone.
---Danny the Red
Anarchism — Noam Chomsky
The State, then is the most flagrant negation, the most cynical & complete negation of humanity. It rends apart the universal solidarity of all men upon the earth, & it unites some of them only in order to destroy, conquer, & enslave all the rest...— Mikhail Bakunin, "Federalism, Socialism & Anti-Teologism," 1867
‘In History, stagnant waters, whether they be the stagnant waters of custom or those of despotism, harbour no life; life is dependent on the ripples created by a few eccentric individuals.
In homage to that life & vitality, the community has to brave certain perils & must countenance a measure of heresy.
One must live dangerously if one wants to live at all.’
— Herbert Read, art critic, anarchist beknighted by the Queen of England
-- " We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens."
'Public school - where the human mind is drilled and manupulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression."
" How long would authority ... exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen."
" Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism."
" When a child has reached manhood, he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition."
" The people are urged to be patriotic ... by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegience to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister."
Emma Goldman
-- "Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto,
'Freedom.' Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to
develop, to live naturally and fully."
-Lucy Parsons
"It clearly follows that to make men moral it is necessary to make their social environment moral. & that can be done in only one way; by assuring the triumph of justice, that is, the complete liberty of everyone in the most perfect equality for all.
Inequality of conditions & rights, & the resulting lack of liberty for all, is the great collective iniquity begetting all individual iniquities."
"Who is it — throughout this endless procession of tortures which has been the history of the human race — who is it that sheds the blood, always the same, relentlessly, without any pause for the sake of mercy?Governments, religions, industries, forced labor camps, all of these are drenched in blood.
— Octave Mirbeau, Ravachol
Direct Action . . . implies that the working class subscribes to notions of freedom & autonomy instead of genuflecting before the principle of authority. Now, it is thanks to this authority principle, the pivot of the modern world — democracy being its latest incarnation — that the human being, tied down by a thousand ropes, moral as well as material, is bereft of any opportunity to display will & initiative. — Emile Pouget, DIRECT ACTION
http://www.anarchosyndicalism.org/theory/da.htm
--
“To combat cultural genocide one needs a critique of civilization itself.”
— Emma Goldman to the Press, a
few days after her arrest in New
York City, February 11, 1916.
|
anarchyLiterally, without government. Not to be confused with chaos. |
by Diego Abad de Santillan
| "...in facing the problem of social transformation, the Revolution cannot consider the state as a medium, but must depend on the organization of producers. We have followed this norm and we find no need for the hypothesis of a superior power to organized labor, in order to establish a new order of things. We would thank anyone to point out to us what function, if any, the State can have in an economic organization, where private property has been abolished and in which parasitism and special privilege have no place. The suppression of the State cannot be a languid affair; it must be the task of the Revolution to finish with the State. Either the Revolution gives social wealth to the producers in which case the producers organize themselves for due collective distribution and the State has nothing to do; or the Revolution does not give social wealth to the producers, in which case the Revolution has been a lie and the State would continue. Our federal council of economy is not a political power but an economic and administrative regulating power. It receives its orientation from below and operates in accordance with the resolutions of the regional and national assemblies. It is a liaison corps and nothing else." |
by Rudolf Rocker
| "Anarcho-Syndicalists are of the opinion that political parties are not fitted . . . 1. To enforce the demands of the producers for the safeguarding and raising of their standard of living [or] 2. To acquaint the workers with the technical management of production and economic life in general and prepare them to take the socio-economic organism into their own hands and shape it according to socialist principles . . . According to their conceptions the trade union has to be the spearhead of the labour movement, toughened by daily combats and permeated by a socialist spirit. Only in the realm of economy are the workers able to display their full strength; for it is their activity as producers which holds together the whole social structure and guarantees the existence of society. Only as a producer and creator of social wealth does the worker become aware of his strength. In solidary union with his followers he creates the great phalanx of militant labour, aflame with the spirit of freedom and animated by the ideal of social justice. For the Anarcho-Syndicalists the labour syndicate are the most fruitful germs of a future society, the elementary school of Socialism in general. Every new social structure creates organs for itself in the body of the old organism; without this prerequisite every social evolution is unthinkable." |
by Fernand Pelloutier
| "Suppose now that, on the day the revolution breaks out, virtually every single producer is organised into the unions: will these not represent, ready to step into the shoes of the present organisation, a quasi-libertarian organisation, in fact suppressing all political power, an organisation whose every part, being master of the instruments of production, would settle all of its affairs for itself, in sovereign fashion and through the freely given consent of its members? And would this not amount to the "free association of free producers?" |
by Rudolf Rocker
Published by the Solidarity Federation - IWA
| "There are two points inherited from a marxist perspective. First of all, marxism separates the political and the economic to try and promote the idea of economic unions, unions that deal purely and simply with economic issues, whereas the political issues are tackled by the political party. Secondly, we are left with the need to struggle against the whole culture that has been built up around delegating activities, around delegating power to others. Anarcho-syndicalism is trying to oppose these negative legacies of marxism, so that people are actually re-educated in order to destroy this culture of dependency and to build up a new kind of culture that is based on activity and action for people, by themselves." |
Published by the Local Federation of the CNT-AIT Sevilla
| "Anarcho-syndicalism is a current of thought and principles which appeared at the end of the 19th century. It has these fundamental characteristics: [1] The goal of organizing the world's workers for the defense of their immediate interests, and to obtain improvements in their quality of life. To form unions to achieve this. [2] The creation of a structure in which there are neither leaders nor executive power. [3] The desire for the radical transformation of society, a transformation to be brought about by the means of a Social Revolution. Without this goal of transformation, anarcho-syndicalism does not exist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The revolution is thought, liberty and desire in action. People who have lived through revolutionary times describe them as a festival of lights, sounds and joy. It is not a bath of blood and violence such as they show on television. The people stop in the street and talk, this happens always and is very important. They talk about everything, they talk with people of other languages and they understand them because they want to communicate with you. They talk about things that nobody before had ever said and that now comes out naturally, without effort. They accomplish things which days before would have been inconceivable..." |
"Like all really good ideas, Anarchy is pretty simple when you get down to it — human beings are at their very best when they are living free of authority, deciding things among themselves rather than being ordered about. That's what the word means — 'Without Government'. A lot of the time most of us know this anyway... but we also know just how difficult it can usually be doing anything for yourself..." |
— anarchist Camillo Berneri, Spain, 21st September, 1936
-- "...it is a serious mistake to draw a distinction between personal and social liberation."
-Makhno
--
— Away from this kingdom, from this last undefiled
place, I would keep our governments, our civilization,
& all other spirit-forsaken & corrupt institutions.— Kenneth Patchen, excerpt from
"There Are Not Many Kingdoms Left",
The Love Poems of Kenneth Patchen
|
 |
"Speak, speak, speak,
& remember that whenever
anyone's liberty to speak is denied,
your liberty is denied also, & your place
is where the attack is.."
— Voltairine De Cleyre [1886-1912].
Biographical information/links
This quote courtesy of Recollection Used Anarchist Books
"So I said good-bye to government, & I gave my reason; That a really good religion, is a form of treason."— Kurt Vonnegut, anarchist, Cat's Cradle
Closing quote from the Daily Bleed, April 5
-- Collage by SaintMeister James Koehnline
The individual who dares commit a crime is guilty in a two-fold sense; first, he is guilty against human conscience, &, above all, he is guilty against the State in arrogating to himself one of its most precious privileges.Closing quote from the Daily Bleed, July 17
"The most violent element in society is ignorance."
— Emma Goldman
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/GoldmanEmma.htmClosing quote from the Daily Bleed, April 28
--"Capitalism is a social cancer. It has always been a social cancer. It is the disease of society. It is the malignancy of society."
— Murray Bookchin
--Anarchist poster image Quotes: Thomas Paine
--Andrade explains, "We are ruled by a lot of robbers. Our legislators are more degraded than a person who abuses a woman or a child & I have no confidence in them."— David Andrade Source: Wikipedia Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Andrade
--""It's a political statement -- or, rather, an anti-political statement. The symbol for anarchy!"
—Batman, explaining the circle-A graffiti, in Detective Comics #608
--"One cannot be... anarchist without being communist... For the least idea of limitation contains already... the germs of authoritarianism."
— Carlo Cafiero, with Errico Malatesta, was one of the main founders of the Italian anarchist movement.
--
Write with slogans.
Write to the nth degree.
— Deleuze & Guattari
--
--
Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876)
- — Mikhail Bakunin, Confessions
It was a festival without beginning or end; I saw everyone and no-one, for each individual was lost in the same enormous strolling crowd; I spoke to everyone without remembering either my own words or those spoken by others, because everyone's attention was absorbed at every step by new objects and events, and by unexpected news.
--
Errico Malatesta (1853-1932)
"In all times and in all places, whatever may be the name that the government takes, whatever has been its origin, or its organization, its essential function is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, and of defending the oppressors and exploiters. Its principal characteristic and indispensable instruments are the policeman and the tax collector, the soldier and the prison."
--"The bomb is the echo of your cannon,
trained upon our starving brothers;
it is the cry of the wounded striker;
'tis the voice of hungry women and children;
the shriek of those maimed and torn in your industrial slaughter houses;
it is the dull thud of the policeman's club upon a defenseless head;
'tis the shadow of the crisis,
the rumbling of a suppressed earthquake--
it is manhood's lightning out of an atmosphere of degradation and misery
that king, president and plutocrat have heaped upon humanity.
The bomb is the ghost of your past crimes." — Alexander Berkman, Mother Earth magazine
-- The following quotes come from the Third World Traveller's "Emma Goldman quotes page" which we encourage you to visit:
" We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens."
*****
'Public school - where the human mind is drilled and manupulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression."
*****
"It takes less mental effort to condemn than to think."
*****
'The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought."
*****
" The majority cares little for ideals and integrity. What it craves is display."
*****
" The majority cannot reason; it has no judgement. It has always placed its destiny in the hands of others; it has followed its leaders even into destruction. The mass has always opposed, condemned, and hounded the innovator, the pioneer of a new truth."
*****
" How long would authority ... exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen."
*****
" Social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass."
*****
" Resistance to tyranny is man's highest ideal. "
*****
"Conceit, arrogance & egotism are the essentials of patriotism. . . .
Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot.
It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, & die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others."
*****
" When a child has reached manhood, he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition."
*****
" The people are urged to be patriotic ... by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegience to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister."
*****
" The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments. Really peaceful countries do not waste life and energy in war preparations, with the result that peace is maintained."
*****
" The powers know that the people at large are like children whose despair, sorrow, and tears can be turned into joy with a little toy. ... An army and navy represents the people's toys."
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Society/EmmaGoldman_quotes.html
--Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty
— Emma Goldman, from her gravestone at Waldheim Cemetary
--" 'What I believe' is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods & governments, not for the human intellect."
— Emma Goldman There is no horror, no curelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous tansaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient & yet so terrible" for reasons of state."
— Michael Bakunin
"The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society." --Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
-- ANARCHIST QUOTES
http://www.xchange.anarki.net/~subvert/quotes.htm
-- 
--
"Whoever denies authority and fights against it is an anarchist.— Sebastien Faure
— poet Hayden Carruth
"The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free..."
— Utah Phillips
"Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it"
— Howard Zinn
I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will
Not rule, and also ruled I will not be!— John Henry Mackay, "Anarchy"
Source:
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5065/definitions.html
Every time people perform an activity they have not themselves defined & do not control, every time they pay for goods they produced with money they received in exchange for their alienated activity, every time they passively admire the products of their own activity as alien objects procured by their money, they give new life to Capital and annihilate their own lives.
— Fredy Perlman, "The Reproduction of Daily Life"
Camillo Berneri (1814-1876) |
|
|
|---|---|---|
| "A harem lacks variety compared to a woman with whom you are deeply in love."
— Camillo Berneri | ||
|
|
Cited Daily Bleed, October 14
--"In a time of universal deceit,
telling the truth is a revolutionary act."— George Orwell
-- Rudolf Rocker wrote in Anarcho-Syndicalism:Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are rather forced upon them from without. And even their enactment into law has for a long time been no guarantee of their security. They do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace.
--
"In a society that abolishes adventure, the only adventure is the abolition of society."
"Anarchist Day book, anarchist almanac, anarchist daybook, anarchist chronology"
--
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
The "happy, dead man" of American beat culture.
"We gotta find a way off this goddamn cop-ridden planet."
A
strong people do not need a government— Emiliano Zapata
-- “Anarchy is not a thing of the future, but of the present; not a matter of demands, but of living”.— Gustav Landauer
--
"To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures that have neither the right, nor wisdom, nor virtue... To be governed means that at every move, operation, or transaction one is noted, registered, entered in a census, taxed, stamped, priced, assessed, patented, licensed, authorized, recommended, admonished, prevented, reformed, set right, corrected. Government means to be subjected to tribute, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed; all in the name of public utility & the general good. Then, at the first sign of resistance or word of complaint, one is repressed, fined, despised, vexed, pursued, hustled, beaten up, garroted, imprisoned, shot, machine-gunned, judged, sentenced, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, & to cap all, ridiculed, mocked, outraged & dishonored. That is government, that is its justice & its morality!"
— P-J Proudhon
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/Proudhon/toBeGoverned.jpg
0 --"Our government is a bird with two right wings...They're devoted to the perpetuation & spread of corporate capitalism."— Lawrence Ferlinghetti, author/poet/painter/beatnik/publisher/owner City Lights Books
0 --"Anarchism does not mean bloodshed; it does not mean robbery, arson, etc. These monstrosities are, on the contrary, the characteristic features of capitalism. Anarchism means peace and tranquility to all."
— August Spies, Haymarket anarchist
1 --"If people behaved like governments, you'd call the cops."
— Kelvin Throop
1 -- Ret Marut, Hal Croves, Traven Torsvan, Bruno Traven, Arnold, Barker, Otto Feige, Kraus, Lainger, Wienecke, Ziegelbrenner, B. Traven."My life belongs to me - only my books belong to the public."
€
"I am freer than anybody else. I am free to choose the parents I want, the country I want, the age I want."
http://noleaders.net/anok/features/btraven.htm
1 -- "Badges? We ain't got no badges! We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any steenkin' badges!".Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The film, based on the novel by the German-Mexican anarchist B. Traven, of course, went on to become one of the greatest films of all time (American Film Institute film rank #21), with one the immortal lines of cinema.
1 --— Henry David Thoreau
1 --
To be a secondary at control,
Or useful serving-man and instrument
To any sovereign state throughout the world.
— Henry David Thoreau
1 --— B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
1 --
"I am no more important than the typographer of my books, than the worker who labours in the factory that makes the paper ... Without them, there would be no books for the readers & it would do no good that I could write them".
1927 --"I am a redneck myself, born & bred on a submarginal farm in Appalachia, descended from an endless line of dark-complected, lug-eared, beetle-browed, insolent barbarian peasants, a line reaching back to the dark forests of central Europe & the alpine caves of my Neanderthal primogenitors."
— Edward Abbeyfrom "In defense of the Redneck", Abbey's Road
"Remaining silent about the destruction of nature is an endorsement of that destruction."
1931 --"Do not jump into your automobile next June & rush out to the canyon country ... In the first place, you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the god-damned contraption & walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone & through the thornbush & cactus.
When traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you'll see something, maybe. Probably not. In the second place, most of what I write about in this book is already gone or going fast.
This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You're holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don't drop it on your foot — throw it at something big & glassy. What have you got to lose?"
— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire http://iww.org/
http://www.usbr.gov/history/hoover.htm
http://weeklywire.com/tw/01-14-99/feat.htmanarchist
Edward Abbey wanted his body transported in the bed of a pickup truck. He wanted to be buried as soon as possible. He wanted no undertakers. No embalming, for Godsake. No coffin. Just an old sleeping bag... Disregard all state laws concerning burial. "I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree," said the message.As for graveside ceremony: He wanted gunfire, & a little music.
"No formal speeches desired, though the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge. But keep it all simple & brief."And then a big happy raucous wake. He wanted more music, gay & lively music. He wanted bagpipes."& a flood of beer & booze! Lots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, & lovemaking," said the message.& meat! Beans & chilis! & corn on the cob. Only a man deeply in love with life & hopelessly soft on humanity would specify, from beyond the grave, that his mourners receive corn on the cob.
"I work best under duress. In fact I only work under duress."http://www.abbeyweb.net/abbey.htmlA Prayer for the Traveler
by Edward Abbey
May your trails be crooked, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into & above the clouds, May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples & castles & poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch & monkeys howl, through miasmal & mysterious swamps & down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes & pinnacles & grottos of endless stone, & down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come & go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something more beautiful & more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
"It's a fools life, a rogue's life, & a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave." The seven degrees of human happiness. First, to die fighting for liberty; second, love and friendship; third, art and science; fourth, smoking; fifth, drinking; sixth, eating; seventh, sleeping.
- MICHAEL BAKUNIN
If I had to answer one question "What is slavery?" and if I were to answer in one word "Murder,"... I would not need to use a lengthy argument to demonstrate that the power to dprive a man of his thoughts, his will, and his personality is a power of life and death... Why, then, to the question "What is property?" may I not likwise reply "theft" without knowing that I am certain to be misunderstood, even though the proposition is simply a transformation of the first?
- PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON
What Is Anarchism?
On our banner, the social-revolutionary banner, ... are inscriber in fiery and bloody letters; the destruction of all States, the annihilation of bourgeois civilisation, free and spontaneous organisation from below upward, by means of free associations, the organisation of the unbridled rabble of toilers, of all emancipated humanity, and the creation of a new universally human world.
- MICHAEL BAKUNIN, Statism And Anarchy, 1873
What we want... is the complete destruction of the domination and exploitation of man by man; we want men united as brothers by a consensus and desired solidarity, all cooperating voluntarily for the wellbeing of all; we want society to be constituted for the purpose of supplying everybody with the means for achieving the maximum well-being, the maximum possible moral and spiritual development; we want bread, freedom, love and science -for everybody.
- ERRICO MALATESTA, Il Programma Anarchico, 1920
Of all social theories, Anarchism alone steadfastly prsoclaims that society exists for man, man for society. The sole legitimate purpose of society isto serve the needs and advance the aspirations of the individual
- EMMA GOLDMAN, The Place Of The Individual in Society,, 1930's
The idea of anarchism is the synthesis of liberalism and socialism, liberation of economics from the fetters of politics, liberation of culture from all political power, liberation of man by solidaric union with his kind.
- RUDOLF ROCKER, Nationalism and Culture, 1933
As man seeks justice in equlity, so society seeks order in anarchy.
- PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON, What is Property?, 1840
Beware of considering anarchy to be a dogma, a doctrine above question or debate, to be venerated by its adepts... No! The absolute freedom which we demand constantly develops our thinking and raises it toward new horizons(according to the turn of mind of various inididuals), takes it out of the narrow framework of regulation and codification. We are not "believers."
- EMILE HENRY, note to his prison governor before being guillotined, 1894
Anarchism recognises only the relative significance of ideas, institutions, and social forms. It is, therefore, not a fixed, self-enclosed social system but, rather, a definate trend in the historic development of mankind.
- RUDOLF ROCKER, Anarcho-Syndicalism, 1938
Smash The State!
Every type of political power presupposes some form of human slavery, forthe maintainanace of which it is called into being. Just as outwardly- that is, in relation to other States- the State has to create artificial antagonisms in order to justify its existence, so also internally the cleavage of society into castes, ranks and classes is an essential condition of its continuance. The State is capable only of protecting old privileges and creating new ones; in that its whole significance is exhausted
- RUDOLF ROCKER, Anarcho-Syndicalism, 1938
The State, then is the most flagrant negation, the most cynical and complete negation of humanity. It rends apart the universal solidarity of all men upon the earth, and it unites some of them only inorder to destroy, conquer, and enslave all the rest...
- MICHAEL BAKUNIN, Federalism, Socialism and Anti-Teologism, 1867
It follows that when government is abolished, wage slavery and capitalism must go with it, because they can not exist without the support and protection of government.
- ALEXANDER BERKMAN, What Is Communist Anarchism?, 1928
The State is an abstraction devouring the life of the people
- MICHAEL BAKUNIN, Letters on Patriotism, 1869
It is a question of crushing fascism once and for all. Yes, and in spite of government. No government in the world fights fascism to the death. When the bourgeosie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to fascism to maintain itself...
We know what we want. To us it means nothing that there is a Soviet Union somewhere in the world, for the sake of whose peace and tranquility the workers of Germany and China were sacrficed to fascist barbarians by Stalin. We want the revolution in Spain, right now, not maybe after the next European war...
I do not expect any help for a libertarian revolution from any government in the world.
- BUENAVENTURI DURRUTI, from an interview during the Spanish Social Revolution, 1936
The very existence of the State demands that there be some privileged class vitally interested in maintaining that existence. And it is precisely the group interests of that class that are called patriotism.
- MICHAEL BAKUNIN
It seems unbelievable that even today, after everything that has happened and is happening in Russia, there are people who still imagine that the difference between socialists and anarchists is only that of wanting revolution gradually or quickly.
- ERRICO MALATESTA, Umanita Nova, September3, 1921
"You will be sitting on top of a pile of ruins even if you are victorious" -
"We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accomodate ourselves for a time. For, you must not forget that we can also build these places and cities, here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts, and that world is growing in this minute."
Buenaventura Durruti, to Pierre Van Passen, August 5, 1936.
Source: http://www.geocities.com/punkrockculture/a1.html
2004 --Anarchist Quotations [dictionary][definitions][essays][people][library][quotes][market][links]
BlackCrayon.com: library: quotes
Anarchist Quotations
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first self-labeled anarchist
"Property is theft!"
"Anarchy is order."
"Whoever puts his hand on me to govern me is a usurper & a tyrant. I declare him my enemy."
WHOEVER PUTS HIS HAND ON ME TO GOVERN ME IS A USURPER AND A TYRANT.
I DECLARE HIM MY ENEMY.
— Pierre Joseph Proudhon
Leo Tolstoy, Russian Novelist and Christian Anarchist
Joseph Labadie, Anarchism and Crime
Peter Kropotkin, "Law and Authority"
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
Laurance Labadie, son of Joseph Labadie
Auberon Herbert, 1894
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
bkMarcus, Isn't Anarchism Unrealistic?
bkMarcus, Isn't Anarchism Unrealistic?
Benjamin R. Tucker, III 2
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
popular paraphrase of Emma Goldman
bkMarcus
bkMarcus, Isn't Anarchism Unrealistic?
Herbert Read, Anarchy & Order
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
Herbert Read, Anarchy & Order
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
Laurance Labadie, son of Joseph Labadie
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
Benjamin R. Tucker, II 8
Benjamin R. Tucker, "Liberty's Declaration of Purpose"
Benjamin R. Tucker, 1883
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
Vanzetti (of Saccho & Vanzetti) in a letter left in his cell before his exectution.
Eunice Minette Schuster,
Native American Anarchism:
A Study of Left-Wing American Individualism, 1932
Eunice Minette Schuster,
Native American Anarchism:
A Study of Left-Wing American Individualism, 1932
Eunice Minette Schuster,
Native American Anarchism:
A Study of Left-Wing American Individualism, 1932
Eunice Minette Schuster,
Native American Anarchism:
A Study of Left-Wing American Individualism, 1932
[General Semantics to the rescue:]
"Let us designate anarchism1 anarchism as you define it. Let us desiginate anarchism2 anarchism as I and the American Heritage College Dictionary define it." This is a FAQ about anarchism2.
Bryan Caplan, Appendix: Defining Anarchism
Robert Anton Wilson, the Utopia USA interview
Joseph Sobran, Anarchy without Fear
Joseph Sobran, The State: Evil and Idol
Joseph Sobran, The State: Evil and Idol
Joseph Sobran, The Myth of "Limited Government"
Joseph Sobran, The Myth of "Limited Government"
Joseph Sobran, The Myth of "Limited Government"
Paul Goodman,
Like A Conquered Province, 1965
Chapter 6: "Is American democracy viable?"
Allen Thornton, Laws of the Jungle
Will you and your government teach eagles to fly and tigers to hunt? Of course not. No one is so arrogant with nature. But you and your government want to tell me what to buy and how to live, and I am more complex than any eagle or tiger. Give me only the same respect you pay the badger and the blue jay, and leave me alone.
After all, anarchy means nothing more than human ecology.
Allen Thornton, Laws of the Jungle
David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
Anthony Gregory, The Minarchist's Dilemma
3000 --I heartily accept the motto, — "That government is best which governs least;" & I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly & systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, — "That government is best which governs not at all;" & when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.— Henry David Thoreau, "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience"
3000 --
3000 --"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hard-headed realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, & county commissioners."
— Ed Abbey
3000 --
"Growth
for the sake of growth
is the ideology of the cancer cell."— Edward Abbey, reminding us that "corporate-sponsored" environmental activities is a rather bad joke.
http://eatthestate.org/
3500 --"Too many of our poets novelists essayists seem to be taking the side of the State in that ancient & inevitable conflict between the State & the independent individual. This is wrong; that is not the natural place for a writer. If it weren't for all these fools & fanatics running around trying to make things better, then most certainly things would get worse. We need this constant pressure against the barriers to change in order simply to prevent a collapse into total evil. The tension against wrong. To keep things from getting worse."
— Ed Abbey
3500 --"...I say, give Nature a little time. In five years, at most in ten, the sun & wind & storms will cleanse & sterilize the repellent mess. The inevitable floods will soon remove all that does not belong within the canyons.
Fresh green willows & tamarisk, box elder & redbud will reappear; & the ancient drowned cottonwoods (noble monuments to themselves) will be replaced by young of their kind. With the renewal of plant life will come the insects, the birds, the lizards & snakes, the mammals.
Within a generation — thirty years — I predict the river & canyons will bear a decent resemblance to their former selves. Within the lifetime of our children Glen Canyon & the living river, heart of the canyonlands, will be restored to us.
The wilderness will again belong to the people."
— Edward Abbey & Phillip Hyde, Slickrock, p.69
http://www.canyoncountryzephyr.com/archives/aroundthebend-april-may98.html
http://williamcalvin.com/bk3/bk3day6.htm
Collage by SaintMeister James Koehnline
Shoed Léo, Anarchists.
Thank You Shoed: http://perso.club-internet.fr/leoferre / http://ytak.club.fr/novembre3.html#15
9003 --
Anarchists and Fellow Travellers |
|---|
Anarchism is the theory that no government is just and that no government is therefore exactly what we ought to strive for. The theme of this particular page on anarchism is "they said it best, first."
I've included some non-anarchist thinkers (e.g. Thomas Paine) whose radical critiques of (then) established governments are worth a look, as well as some future-primitivist and luddite theorists (e.g. Zerzan) and others (e.g. Bey, Black) whose critique of modern society and whose programs for change reach further than the organization and dissolution of government.
Anarchism (when it's not merely a leather-jacket fashion statement) is often thought of as a dramatic battle of mad bombers (Kaczynski) and assassination (Czolgolsz, Berkman) - but the con-game of government has never been more powerful or more jealous of power. Today anarchism is a battle of inches - individuals insisting on reclaiming individual sovereignty one decision and one moment at a time.
You can't assassinate tyrants very often anymore and expect anything meaningful to change. Taking casualties from 'their side' may have a deterrent effect but may just as easily make things worse. If you want to kill the tyrant today you're talking about oceans of blood, probably including your own. The tyrant today is the body politic as an evolved organism, parasitical where it is tangent to our lives.
So if assassinating tyrants is out, what's left for the freedom-fighter? Wouldn't you know it: Revolution can be fun! Exercise your creativity and exorcise the busybodies and sadists at the same time by checking out the rest of the Culture Jammers' Encyclopedia.
Hakim Bey"The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it." |
|
|
Bob Black"There is more freedom in any moderately deStalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace." |
|
Murray Bookchin"Anarchism [has] developed in the tension between two basically contradictory tendencies: a personalistic commitment to individual autonomy and a collectivist commitment to social freedom." |
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912) |
 |
|
|---|---|---|
| "Of the essence of government... it is a thing apart, developing its own interests at the expense of what opposes it; all attempts to make it anything else fail." | ||
|
Emma Goldman (1869-1940) |
 |
|---|---|---|
| "Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence - too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere." | ||
|
Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) |
 |
|---|---|---|
| "If you reason instead of repeating what is taught you; if you analyze the law and strip off those cloudy fictions with which it has been draped in order to conceal its real origin, which is the right of the stronger, and its substance, which has ever been the consecration of all the tyrannies handed down to mankind through its long and bloody history; when you have comprehended this, your contempt for the law will be profound indeed." | ||
Thomas Paine (1737-1809) |  |
|
|---|---|---|
| "Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured." | ||
Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) |  |
|
|---|---|---|
| "A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years." | ||
Henry David Thoreau (1816-1862) |  |
|
|---|---|---|
| "I have not so surely forseen that any Cossack or Chippeway would come to disturb the honest and simple commonwealth, as that some monster institution would at length embrace and crush its free members in its scaly folds; for it is not to be forgotten, that while the law holds fast the thief and murderer, it lets itself go loose. When I have not paid the tax which the State demanded for that protection which I did not want, itself has robbed me; when I have asserted the liberty it presumed to declare, itself has imprisoned me... Thus it has happened, that not the Arch Fiend himself has been in my way, but these toils which tradition says were originally spun to obstruct him." | ||
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854-1939) |  |
|
|---|---|---|
| "The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that 'the best government is that which governs least,' and that that which governs least is no government at all." | ||
John Zerzan"Many say that millions would die if the present techno-global fealty to work and the commodity were scrapped. But this overlooks many potentialities. For example, consider the vast numbers of people who would be freed from manipulative, parasitic, destructive pursuits for those of creativity, health and liberty." |
| Endorsed by the Confederation Generale du Travaille (830 votes to 8) at its 1906 congress. |
| "Organisation: The base of discussion and decision is the workers assemblies and all decisions come from the base." |
By Emile Pouget
| "Direct Action . . . implies that the working class subscribes to notions of freedom and autonomy instead of genuflecting before the principle of authority.
Now, it is thanks to this authority principle, the pivot of the modern world - democracy being its latest incarnation - that the human being, tied down by a thousand ropes, moral as well as material, is bereft of any opportunity to display will and initiative." |
FERNAND PELLOUTIER AND REVOLUTIONARY SYNDICALISM
| "Fernand Pelloutier can, in the words of Pierre Monatte, be 'justly regarded as the father of revolutionary syndicalism' . . . 'Can you deny', he wrote in 1894, 'that at the source of all disorder, of bad politics and bad morals, of greed and cruelty, of egoism and envy, one always finds money. Money is the beginning and end of everything'. Specifically, Pelloutier located the cause of the ills of society in a perversion of the system of exchange, the substitution by capitalism of exchange value for use value. The law of supply and demand ensured that products were priced not according to their intrinsic value but in line with the dictates of the market. Inevitably, Pelloutier argued, such a system operated in the interests of those who possessed capital, the manipulators of the system of exchange, and contrary to the interests of the consumer and producer, whose labour benefited only 'the parasite, the rentier and the financier'. 'To the extent that one can say that a man is rich', Pelloutier observed, 'the less he has worked: his useful production is inversely proportionate to his wealth'. Here, in essence, was 'the origin of the modern social system in its entirety'..." |
| "Only individuals, and a small number of them at that, can be carried away by an abstract and "pure" idea. The millions, the masses, not only of the proletariat but also of the enlightened and privileged classes, are carried away only by the power and logic of "facts," apprehending and envisaging most of the time only their immediate interests or moved only by their monetary, more or less blind, passions. Therefore, in order to interest and draw the whole proletariat into the work of the International, it is necessary approach it not with general and abstract ideas, but with a living tangible comprehension of its own pressing problems, of which evils the workers are aware in a concrete manner." |
By Ralph Chaplin
| "Every intelligent person now realizes that there is something radically wrong with the social system under which we are living. Everyone, excepting the beneficiaries of this system, agrees that something ought to be done about it. The trouble is that people at present seem unable to agree on any common program of action. Some accept their unhappy lot with a patience and fortitude worthy of a better cause, others theorize ineffectually and do little, while still others complain bitterly and strike out blindly. Nearly everyone rushes hither and tither seeking escape but without having any clear-cut objective in view . . . The argument for the General Strike is based on the persistent and very logical working class conviction that the ruling class will refuse to permit itself to be dispossessed by any power weaker than its own and that public opinion, political action and insurrection therefore will not be permitted to be developed or used to any appreciable extent. It is further based on the firm belief that Labor alone can save the world from chaos during and following the period of transition. As long as the production of goods under any system depends on the disciplined solidarity of the producing class it is evident that this solidarity alone is capable of stopping the operations of the old order or of starting and continuing those of the new." |
| "Although the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July, 1936, was followed by a far-reaching social revolution in the anti-Franco camp -- more profound in some respects than the Bolshevik Revolution in its early stages -- millions of discerning people outside of Spain were kept in ignorance, not only of its depth and range, but even of its existence, by virtue of a policy of duplicity and dissimulation of which there is no parallel in history. - Burnett Bolloten" |
by Emile Pouget
| "The Party of Labour is what it says it is, the banding together of the workers into one homogeneous bloc; the autonomous organisation of the working class into an aggregate operating on the terrain of the economy; by virtue of its origins, its essence, it shuns all compromise with bourgeois elements . . . The Party of Labour is a party of interests. It takes no account of the opinions of its component members: it acknowledges and co-ordinates only the interests - be they material or moral or intellectual - of the working class. Its ranks are open to all of the exploited regardless of their political or religious views." |
By Michael Bakunin
| ". . . there is still too great a difference in the level of industrial, political, intellectual, and moral development among the working masses in various countries for it to be possible today to unite them around a single political, anti-religious program. To suggest such a program for the International and to make it an absolute condition for admission to that Association, would be to establish a sect, not a worldwide association, and it would destroy the International." |
by Grover H. Perry
| "The Industrial Workers of the World are laying the foundation of a new government. This government will have for its legislative halls the mills, the workshops and factories. Its legislators will be the men in the mills, shops and factories. Its legislative enactments will be those pertaining to the welfare of the workers . . . These things are to be. No force can stop them. Armies will be of no avail. Capitalist governments may issue their mandates in vain. The power of the workers--industrially organized--is the only power on earth worth considering--once they realize that power. Classes will disappear, and in their place will be only useful members of society--the workers." |
By Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
| "For us to discuss the morality of sabotage would be as absurd as to discuss the morality of the strike or the morality of the class struggle itself. In order to understand sabotage or to accept it at all it is necessary to accept the concept of class struggle. If you believe that between the workers on the one side and their employers on the other there is peace, there is harmony such as exists between brothers, and that consequently whatever strikes and lockouts occur are simply family squabbles; if you believe that a point can be reached whereby the employer can get enough and the worker can get enough, a point of amicable adjustment of industrial warfare and economic distribution, then there is no justification and no explanation of sabotage intelligible to you. Sabotage is one weapon in the arsenal of labor to fight its side of the class struggle. Labor realizes, as it becomes more intelligent, that it must have power in order to accomplish anything; that neither appeals for sympathy nor abstract rights will make for better conditions." |
By Emile Pouget
| "Since the day a man had the criminal ability to profit by another man's labour, since that very same day the exploited toiler has instinctively tried to give to his master less than was demanded from him. In this wise the worker was unconsciously doing SABOTAGE, demonstrating in an indirect way the irrepressible antagonism that arrays Capital and Labor one against the other." |
By L. Gambone
| "Syndicalism died after WWI. Syndicalism was finished as a revolutionary movement by 1910. Syndicalism was finished off by Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Syndicalism was a primitive millennial movement which evolved into modern social democratic unionism. Or so the academic labour historians will tell you. The purpose of this pamphlet is to show that these conceptions are myths." |
by Emile Pouget
| " The trade union offers itself as a school for the will: its preponderant role is the result of its members' wishes, and, if it is the highest form of association, the reason is that it is the condensation of workers' strengths made effective through their direct action, the sublime form of the deliberate enactment of the wishes of the proletarian class. ." |
| Main Page | Host |
Fredy Perlman, Against His-story, Against Leviathan! |
|---|
Is it possible that the beast is not one but many, that Ur is not in Sumer but wherever people gather, that Leviathan is as natural to human beings as hives to bees?Anything is possible, but the admission of such a possibility is cynically misanthropic & it precludes envisioning any exit from the trap.
Such a possibility cannot be admitted into a song of freedom, because its admission is a prognostication of Earth's doom.
— Fredy Perlman, Against His-story, Against Leviathan!
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/PerlmanFredy.htm
http://www.syntac.net/hoax/anarchism.html
anti-CopyRite 2000-3000, more or less
Subscribe to daily email updates (include the words 'subscribe bleed' in subject field),
or send questions, suggestions, additions, corrections to:
BleedMeister David BrownVisit the complete Daily Bleed Archives
The Daily Bleed is freely produced by Recollection Used Books
Use your back button to return to your last page,
Or visit
The Charlatan Stew Collection | The Anarchist Encyclopedia | Daily Bleed Calendar | The Stan Iverson Archives | The Anarchist Timelineanti-CopyRite 2002-2007, more or less
Questions, suggestions, additions, corrections to David Brown
The Charlatan Stew Collection is freely sponsored & produced by The Stan Iverson ArchivesVisitors since June 1, 2005
![[WSB]](http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/images/BB/ws1.gif)
The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.
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. There is but one way out of this blunder: Man must break his fetters which have chained him to the gates of heaven and hell, so that he can begin to fashion out of his reawakened and illumined consciousness a new world upon earth.
Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us to-day.... The rulers of the earth have realized long ago what potent poison inheres in the Christian religion. That is the reason they foster it; that is why they leave nothing undone to instill it into the blood of the people. They know only too well that the subtleness of the Christian teachings is a more powerful protection against rebellion and discontent than the club or the gun.
Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.
