Josiah Warren

"The circulating medium being issued only by those who labor, they would suddenly become invested with all the wealth and all the power; and those who did not labor, be they ever so rich now, would as suddenly become poor and powerless."

"Public influence is the real government of the world."

"The necessity of every one paying in his own labor for what he consumes, affords the only legitimate and effectual check to excessive luxury, which has so often ruined individuals, states, and empires; and which has now brought almost universal bankruptcy upon us."

"Anarchism had been connected to communitarianism in the United States since the days of Josiah Warren...Warren's failures were the failures of a generation. Communitarianism as a movement was moribund by the 1860s. An urbanizing, industrializing society that was coming to depend on large-scale organization had little space left, physically or psychologically, within which men and women could secede from the larger community and at the same time believe that they were creating a new social order that would eventually dominate the entire society. Nevertheless, despite the disintegration of communitarianism in practice, the idea of communalism retained a powerful hold on the minds of many Americans. This was particularly true in the last decade and a half of the nineteenth century."

"Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost."

"It has now become a very common sentiment, that there is some deep and radical wrong somewhere, and that legislators have proved themselves incapable of discovering, or of remedying it."

"Mr. Owen said he wanted honesty of purpose, and he got dishonesty. He wanted temperance, and instead, he was continually troubled with the intemperate. He wanted industry, and he found idleness. He wanted cleanliness, and found dirt. He wanted carefulness, and found waste. He wanted to find desire for knowledge, but he found apathy. He wanted the principles of the formation of character understood, and he found them misunderstood. He wanted these good qualities combined in one and all the individuals of the Community, but he could not find them ; neither could he find those who were self-sacrificing and enduring enough, to prepare and educate their children to possess these qualities. Thus it was proved that his principles were either entirely erroneous, or much in advance of the age in which he promulgated them. He seems to have forgotten, that if one and all the thousand persons assembled there, had possessed the qualities which he wished them to possess, there would have been no necessity for his vain exertions to form a Community ; because of necessity there would of necessity be brotherly love, charity, industry, and plenty. We want no more than these, and if we can not find it, we can not form Communities ; and if we can not find parents who are ready and willing to educate their children, to give them these qualities for a Community life, then what hope is there of Communism in the future?"