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 Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.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 natures 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 pessimistgood cheerhis 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,
Whod barter anothers honor, recognizing no bounds,
To the Governor, the Jury, who anothers life theyd 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."
Elisιe 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 mockιd.
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."
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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.
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"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
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"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
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"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."
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"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"
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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."
![[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.
