Anarchists

"Good or bad I propose to be something great!"

"Two things greater Than all things are; And the first is love And the second is war."

"What does it matter whether millions of semi-brainless beings curse or bless my memory? It is equally one to me whether they hang my bones in chains like they did the bones of Cromwell, or build a pyramid of stone over my mouldering coffin. Today only do I regard. Today I know. Today is mine. Today I wish to be something."

"Why should we not go to the extremes if we desire to play a part in the great world drama?...to go to the extremes is ever symptomatic of genius and greatness. Weakness is to compromise, to hesitate, to be halfhearted."

"Why do men go to war? Is it not in some way to better their condition. All these new fangled notions that men fight for other things than their own personal advantage is pure delusion. It is the solid things of life that men are ever after, though some of them haven't the courage to admit it. What is love of country but love of it's good things?"

"Now what I desire to know is this: If we want to shoot a man and he badly wants to shoot us, why should we not take his property (if we can) as well as his life? Isn't that the way men win a 'fatherland' first? Don't they fight and conquer the original owners and then take the land? Very well then, what is the good of being a soldier, of risking your life, and being a brave man in battle, if you cannot sieze from your beaten enemy, what your greater valor wins and what you stand badly in need of?"

"Women find little pleasure in the society of women."

"Most women you know are very much interested in the man who is reputed to be deeply admired by other women."

"Women have ever been the stumbling block and betrayers of ambition."

"Those three divine attributes of a perfect woman: goodness, beauty and wealth."

"There is no field of activity for great men without the coming of great wars, great struggles and great revolutions."

"Shall it be said of us in after years that we studied the history of the rise and fall of empires, republics, revolutions , and Caesar's for naught? Shall men say of us we missed our opportunity?."

"[A] reasoned negation of the Ten Commandments—the Golden Rule–the Sermon on the Mount—Republican Principles—Christian Principles—and "Principles" in general. It proclaims upon scientific evolutionary grounds, the unlimited absolutism of Might, and asserts that cut-and-dried moral codes are crude and immoral inventions, promotive of vice and vassalage."

"The reason there are no great poets and writers now is because there are no great deeds or heroes to write about. The world is becoming tame and sad and dreary."

"Why should a man deliberately encircle his mind with needless prison walls. No man can reach highest excellence who puts limits to his own thought."

"Let us turn passing events to our own advantage. Out of conditions as they exist let us carve out fortunes and realize our ambitions. In the beginning nature made man a contending animal. Are we not all Greeks or Trojans? We must therefore make up our minds for a life of continual battle, we must fight, I say, morning, noon and night, if need be against an entire world."

"It can postpone death, cure disease, release the captive, bring sight to the blind, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, destroy the despot, win the love of women, and procure all reasonable earthly happiness to any man who is not entirely too old. In course of time perhaps it may even resurrect the dead, create life and storm the very gates of heaven, for money is force and force is the essence of the universe."

"One more pillar of anarchist has been broken, one more idol of blackness has been crashed down from its pedestal... . Legends formed around this "tsaritsa of anarchism". Several times she was rounded, several times her head was cut off but, like the legendary Hydra, she always grew a new one. She survived and turned up again, ready to spill more blood... . And if now in our uyezd the offspring of the Makhnovshchina, the remnants of this poisonous evil, are still trying to prevent the rebirth of normal society and are straining themselves to rebuild once more the bloody rule of Mkno, this latest blow means we are witnessing the funeral feast at the grave of the Makhnovshchina."

"She is simply a bandit operating under the flag of Soviet power."

"Don't think badly of me.–M. Nikiforova"

"I had heard that she was a beautiful woman... Marusya was sitting at a table and had a cigarette in her teeth. This she-devil really was a beauty: about 30, gypsy-type with black hair and a magnificent bosom which filled out her military tunic."

"The speeches of the Left Bloc representatives seem so pale in comparison with the speeches of the anarchists and, in particular, with the speech of M. Nikiforova."

"The anarchists are not promising anything to anyone. The anarchists only want people to be conscious of their own situation and seize freedom for themselves."

"The workers and peasants must, as quickly as possible, seize everything that was created by them over many centuries and use it for their own interests."

"Cossacks, I must tell you that you are the butchers of the Russian workers. Will you continue to be so in the future, or will you acknowledge your own wickedness and join the ranks of the oppressed? Up to now you have shown no respect for the poor workers. For one of the tsar's rubles or a glass of wine, you have nailed them living to the cross."

"The property of the estate owners (pomeshchiks) doesn't belong to any particular detachment, but to the people as a whole. Let the people take what they want."

"The true love is a state of half-madness, of some kind of soft obsession, ruling a so delicate kind of feeling that can lead a person from the greatest happiness to the most dreadful pain."

"At the following morning, when the first citizens started walking around, he was found dead. So died the poor and brave Antônio da Silva Marramaque who, at the age of 18, dreamed with the glories of poetry and was now murdered due his great soul and brave moral! He didn't compose any sonnet and, if he did, he composed bad ones. But, by his way, he was a hero and a poet... that God bless him!"

"Inside this complex labyrinth of roads lives a great part of the city's population, whose existence is ignored by the government, despite it still demands abusive taxes from it. Taxes which are used in magnificent and useless buildings elsewhere in Rio de Janeiro."

"He was going to die, and who knows that it could be in that same night? What crime had he committed in his entire life? None. He has carried all his life with the mirage of studying his nation, loving it, intending to contribute to its happiness and prosperity. He has spent all his adolescence in this project, and all his virility too. And now, in his elder ages, how did life return him this favor? Killing him!"

"Bruzundanga's literature is ruled by cute, rhyming and tasteless sonnets."

"Nobody precisely knew where he born, but it's known it wasn't in São Paulo, nor in Rio de Janeiro, nor in Pará. It was wrong trying to find in this man any kind of regionalism. Before anything, Quaresma was a Brazilian."

"In the Samoiedas literary school, the students get satisfied only with shallow literary appearances and a ordinary simulation of notoriety, sometimes because of their intellectual incapacity and some other times by a vicious and careless instruction."

"Ah! I would be a Doctor! (...) Ah! Doctor! Doctor! Walking through the roads, through the streets, though the squares, through the rooms, receiving all the honors: "Doctor, what have you done today? How are you, doctor?" This feeling was simply divine!"

"The great question is: from which country shall we copy the Constitution?"

"It was a rude, brutal and purposely ugly book. However, it was an honest book."

"We are nothing in this life."

"From my earliest years, the first thing that I saw was suffering. And if I couldn't rebel when I was a child, it was only because I was an unaware being then. But the sorrows of my grandparents and parents were recorded in my memory during those years of unawareness. How many times did I see our mother cry because she couldn't give us the bread that we asked for! And yet our father worked without resting for a minute. Why couldn't we eat the bread that we needed if our father worked so hard? That was the first question whose answer I found in social injustice. And, since that same injustice exists today, thirty years later, I don't see why, now that I'm conscious of this, that I should stop fighting to abolish it. I don't want to remind you of the hardships suffered by our parents until we got older and could help out the family. But then we had to serve the so-called fatherland. The first was Santiago. I still remember mother weeping. But even more strongly etched in my memory are the words of our sick grandfather, who sat there, disabled and next to the heater, punching his legs in anger as he watched his grandson go off to Morocco, while the rich bought workers' sons to take their children's place … Don't you see why I'll continue fighting as long as these social injustices exist?"

"It is possible that only a hundred of us will survive, but with that hundred we shall enter Saragossa, beat Fascism and proclaim libertarian communism. I will be the first to enter Saragossa; I will proclaim the free commune. We shall subordinate ourselves neither at Madrid nor Barcelona, neither to Azaña nor Companys. If they wish, they can live in peace with us; if not, we shall go to Madrid … We shall show you, bolsheviks, how to make a revolution."

"We make war and revolution at the same time. Militiamen are fighting for the conquest of the land, the factories, bread, and culture … the pickaxe and the shovel are as important as the rifle. Comrades, we will win the war!"

"You don't fight a war with words, but with fortifications. The pickaxe and the shovel are as important at the rifle. I can't say it often enough."

"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 into a general and rule the men with a military rod. They have come to me voluntarily, they are ready to stake their lives in our antifascist fight. 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."

"Durruti never strayed far from his fellow workers. Very early in his life, he challenged the position that the anarchists should be the vanguard of the revolution. He believed that "what anarchists had to do was understand the natural process of rebellion and not separate themselves from the working class under the pretext of serving it better. That would only be a prelude to betrayal and bureaucratization, to a new form of domination." All his life he was a card-carrying member of the CNT who valued hard work, sacrifice, and a strong sense of responsibility to his comrades. During the war, he ate, slept, and fought alongside the men in his column."

"No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges."

"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 sacrificed to Fascist barbarians by Stalin. We want revolution here in Spain, right now, not maybe after the next European war. We are giving Hitler and Mussolini far more worry with our revolution than the whole Red Army of Russia. We are setting an example to the German and Italian working class on how to deal with Fascism."

"There are only two roads, victory for the working class, freedom, or victory for the fascists which means tyranny. Both combatants know what's in store for the loser. We are ready to end fascism once and for all, even in spite of the Republican government."

"We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and 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. That world is growing in this minute."

"The only church that illuminates is a burning church."

"One of the greatest autobiographies in the English language."

"Not the wretchedest man or woman but has a deep secretive mythology with which to wrestle with the material world and to overcome it and pass beyond it. Not the wretchedest human being but has his share in the creative energy that builds the world. We are all creators. We all create a mythological world of our own out of certain shapeless materials."