Anarchists

"Anarchism has never existed as a form of society, nor is it ever likely to. Indeed, I consider it a grave mistake to conceive of anarchism as a social theory; I do not expect any type of society to guarantee or to respect my individuality. ... The war between the individual and society will go on as long as both exist. Anarchism is not a form of society. It is the cutting edge of individualism, the negative side of an egoist philosophy. The anarchist is not a peddler of schemes of social salvation, but a permanent resister of all attempts to subordinate the uniqueness of the individual to the authority of the collective. The anarchist is someone who refuses to be seduced even by the most glittering or most rational vision of a society in which diverse egoisms have been harnessed into harmonising one with another."

"I envy the savages. And I will cry to them in a loud voice: “Save yourselves, civilization is coming.”"

"I am surrounded by a humanity that wants what everyone else wants. My isolated affirmation is a most serious crime."

"I am gathering all the agony of the world together. Anyone who has a hidden worm gnawing away inside him, anyone dressed in mourning for the ideal, anyone who laughs scornfully at the ruin of the mind, may come. I need my sorrow to become a flood, a storm."

"Cowardice, caressed by christianity, creates morality."

"Like liberals, anarchists want freedom; like socialists, anarchists want equality. But we are not satisfied by liberalism alone or by socialism alone. Freedom without equality means that the poor and the weak are less free than the rich and strong, and equality without freedom means that we are all slaves together. Freedom and equality are not contradictory, but complementary."

"Freedom is not genuine if some people are too poor or too weak to enjoy it, and equality is not genuine if some people are ruled by others. The crucial contribution to political theory made by anarchists is this realization that freedom and equality are in the end the same thing."

"Within the context of revolutionary discourse, ideas which do not truly challenge consensual conceits become commodified within the consensual. ... Anything that can be removed from radical discourse will become incorporated and thereby nullified within the consensual narrative. Revolution and its leaders can all too easily become commodity: Che the poster, Sartre ‘le maitre de’. It is in this manner that revolutionary ideas are consumed as product within a construct of moderation calculatedly designed to render them impotent."

"Now comes death, now one must hold one's head high!"

"Now it can become clear to man that freedom and peace of the nations can only come when as Jesus and his followers, and in our time above all Tolstoi advised, they choose to fully abstain from any violence."

"Gustav Landauer wrote: “Uprising as basic law, change and overthrow as a rule for all times… that was the greatness and the holiness of the mosaic social order. We need that again: new rules and a spirit of change that does not fix things and laws definitively but declares itself permanent. The revolution should become part of our social order, the basic rule of our basic law”."

"A goal can only be reached if the means are in consonance with its essential nature. One will never attain non-violence through violence."

"Anarchy is not a matter of the future; it is a matter of the present. It is not a matter of making demands; it is a matter of how one lives."

"There is no "state" on the one hand, and people who live in it on the other. The "state" much rather belongs to what people do and understand. People do not live in the state. The state lives in the people."

"What is the function of prisons? Above all, to keep people docile in other prisons, Prisons are necessary not to pres eve order so much as to protect and enforce the inequalities produced by the market. The coercion and control they represent isn't an aberration in an otherwise free society, but the essential precondition for capitalism. Prisons are simply a more extreme manifestation of the same logic inherent in property rights and national borders."

"Today there are as many people behind bars in the United States as there were in the Soviet gulags at the height of Stalin's power."

"Self-employment gives you more agency without offering any more liberty: you get to manage you own affairs, but only on the market's terms. Being self-employed simply means organizing the sale of your labor yourself and personally taking on all the risks of competing."

"It takes a lot to beat this natural curiousity out of children. You have to take them away from their families, isolate them in sterile environments with only a few overworked adults, and teach them that learning is a discipline. You had to send them to school."

"There is a rebel army out in the bush plotting the abolition of wage slavery, as sure as there are employees in every workplace waging guerilla war with loafing, pilfering, and disobedience-and you can join up, too, if youhaven't already. But before we start laying plans and sharpening spears, let's look more closely at what we're up against."

"What exactly is work? We could define it as activity for the sake of making money. But aren't slave labor and unpaid internships work, too? We could say it's activity that accumulates profit for someone , whether or not it benefits the one who carries it out. But does that mean that as soon as you start making money from an activity, it becomes work even if it was play before? Perhaps we could define work as labor that takes more from us that it gives back, or that is governed by external forces."

"What else can you do? If you refuse, the economy will go on without you; it doesn't need you any more than it needs any of the hundreds of millions already unemployed, and there's no point going hungry for nothing."

"What if nobody worked? Sweatshops would empty out and assembly lines would grind to a halt, at least the ones producing things no one would make voluntarily. Telemarketing would cease. Despicable individuals who only hold sway over others because of wealth and title would have to learn better social skills. Traffic Jams would come to an end; so would oil spills. Paper money and job applications would be used as fire starter as people reverted to barter and sharing. Grass and flowers would grow from the cracks in the sidewalk, eventually making the way for fruit trees."

"Capitalism exists because we invest everything in it: all our energy and ingenuity in the marketplace, all our resources at the supermarket and in the stock market, all our attention in the media. To be more precise, capitalism exists because our daily activities are it. But would we continue to reproduce it if we felt we and another choice?"

"We move in spiral paths, imploding or expanding, relinquishing everything to become what we hate or finding the faith to discover new possibilities and new loves."

""Abundance and scarcity are above all the manifestations of opposing approaches to life: ingenuity or inertia, faith or fear. If we restructure our values and assumptions about what the cosmos has to offer us, we can enter a new world of possibilities.:"

"Nothing can replace the feel of the paper against your fingers, the ink soaked up by paper, the sensation of turning a page with the wind rustling your hair, or the deliberate and intricate presentation of images and text that you can only get in the real world, on real pages. And few things can be as torturous as sitting in front of a computer screen for hours on end."

"Those who cannot forget the past, are doomed to repeat it."

"Everyone can have a full life-but not everyone can have a full wallet."

"No one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live; no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential unless you invite them to."

"Life's most beautiful and inspiring moments occur at 3am, just prowling, looking for nothing but always finding something."

"Here's a story: once upon a time, human beings lived in a relationship of trust with the earth, seeing it as a wellspring of abundance.We ate fruit, which grew freely around us, naturally wrapped in a biodegradable peel and containing seeds from which more fruit trees would grow after the fruit was eaten. Today we eat candy bars, for which we must exchange our labor, of which supplies are strictly limited-and when we throw away the wrappers, which are manufactures from plastics and chemicals foreign to nature, we can be sure that we are adding to the slow accumulation of garbage that makes fruit trees less and less abundant."

"Anarchism is the revolutionary idea that no one is more qualified than you are to decide what your life will be."

"Can we imagine a togetherness that isn't founded on gross generalizations, conceptualizing ourselves as unique individuals who still stand to gain from looking out for one another? Can we identify with each other rather than with categories or masters?"

"Because I care about human beings, I want them to be free to do what is right for them. Isn't that more important than mere peace on earth? Isn't freedom, even dangerous freedom, preferable to the safest slavery, to peace bought with ignorance, cowardice, and submission?"

"CrimethInc. is significant in what it is not: It is not a membership organization It is not an elitist vanguard that purports to lead the masses out of darkness to salvation - experience has shown a thousand times that such parties are the social forces that create masses. And it is not a Movement, either: for such things only exist as part of history, and as such are subject to its laws - gestation, ascendance, decline. As crimethink is a force that exists beneath te currents of history, outside the chain of events, CrimethInc. is the first stirring of a revolt that will take us all out of history."

"At this moment, an employee in a grocery store is setting out genetically engineered produce rather than tending her garden; A dishwasher is sweating over a steaming sink while unwashed dishes stack up in his kitchen; A line cook is taking orders from strangers instead of cooking at a neighborhood barbecue; An advertising agent is composing jingles for laundry detergent rather than playing music with his friends. A woman is watching wealthier people's children at a daycare program rather than spending time with her own; A child is being dropped off there instead of growing up with those who know and love him; A student is writing a thesis about an activity that interests her instead of participating in it. A man is masturbating with internet pornography instead of exploring his sexuality with a partner; An activist, weary after a hard day's work, is putting on a Hollywood movie for entertainment; And a demonstrator who has her own unique reasons to protest is carrying a sign mass-produced by a bureaucratic organization."

"Obeying teachers, bosses, the demands of the market-not to mention laws, parents' expectations, religious scriptures social norms- we're conditioned from infancy to put our desire on hold. Following orders becomes an unconscious reflex, whether or not they are in our best interest; deferring to experts becomes second nature."

"Self-employment is associated with personal freedom; but managing your own business generally makes more demands on your time than working for a corporation, and not necessarily at comparable rates."

"I always secretly looked forward to nothing going as planned. That way, I wasn't limited by my imagination. That way, anything can, and always did, happen."

"We left behind the other kids; their path-working, drinking, and being grown up- and rejected all that made them grumpy, uncreative and lifeless. We dumpstered, squatted, and shoplifted our lives back. Everything fell into place when we decided our lives were meant to be lived. Life serves the risk taker"

"Because human beings are social animals, attention creates meaning and thus value: when everyone else runs to see what's going on, each of us can't help but do the same. Thus the collective creativity and potential of a whole society is channeled into a few figureheads. Of course we love them, or at least love to hate them-they represent the only way accesses our own displaced potential."

"Capitalism developed in a symbiotic relationship with the apparatus of the state. In feudal times, most people had obtained much of what they needed outside the exchange economy . But as the state consolidated power, the fields and pastures that had been held in common were privatized and local minorities and overseas continents were ruthlessly plundered. As resources began to flow more dynamically, merchants and bankers gained increasing power and influence."

"Compared with Socrates and Bruno, with the great martyrs of Russia, with the Chicago Anarchists, Francisco Ferrer, and unnumbered others, Christ cuts a poor figure indeed."

"Now the truth is, that what Ferrer was teaching in his schools was really instigating the overthrow of the social order of Spain; furthermore it was not only instigating it, but it was making it as certain as the still coming of the daylight out of the night of the east. But not by the teaching of riot; of the use of dagger, bomb, or knife; but by the teaching of the same sciences which are taught in our public schools, through a generally diffused knowledge of which the power of Spain’s despotic Church must crumble away. Likewise it was laying the primary foundation for the overthrow of such portions of the State organization as exist by reason of the general ignorance of the people. The Social Order of Spain ought to be overthrown; must be overthrown, will be overthrown; and Ferrer was doing a mighty work in that direction. The men who killed him knew and understood it well...Ferrer is with the immortals. His work is spreading over the world; it will yet return, and rid Spain of its tyrants."

"Although Voltairine de Cleyre's years as a teacher helped to form her educational ideas, both she and Emma Goldman became associated with the Modern School movement as a result of their involvement in the cause of Francisco Ferrer"

"It needs very little reflection to see that a school for rich children only cannot be a rational school. From the very nature of things it will tend to insist on the maintenance of privilege and the securing of their advantages. The only sound and enlightened form of school is that which co-educates the poor and the rich, which brings the one class into touch with the other in the innocent equality of childhood, by means of the systematic equality of the rational school."

"I venture to say quite plainly: the oppressed and the exploited have a right to rebel, because they have to reclaim their rights until they enjoy their full share in the common patrimony. The Modern School, however, has to deal with children, whom it prepares by instruction for the state of manhood, and it must not anticipate the cravings and hatreds, the adhesions and rebellions, which may be fitting sentiments in the adult. In other words, it must not seek to gather fruit until it has been produced by cultivation, nor must it attempt to implant a sense of responsibility until it has equipped the conscience with the fundamental conditions of such responsibility. Let it teach the children to be men; when they are men, they may declare themselves rebels against injustice."

"If modern pedagogy means an effort towards the realisation of a new and more just form of society; if it means that we propose to instruct the rising generation in the causes which have brought about and maintain the lack of social equilibrium; if it means that we are anxious to prepare the race for better days, freeing it from religious fiction and from all idea of submission to an inevitable socio-economic inequality; we cannot entrust it to the State or to other official organisms which necessarily maintain existing privileges and support the laws which at present consecrate the exploitation of one man by another, the pernicious source of the worst abuses."

"There must be a co-education of the different social classes as well as of the two sexes. I might have founded a school giving lessons gratuitously; but a school for poor children only would not be a rational school, since, if they were not taught submission and credulity as in the old type of school, they would have been strongly disposed to rebel, and would instinctively cherish sentiments of hatred."

"There is no escape from the dilemma. There is no middle term in the school for the disinherited class alone; you have either a systematic insistence, by means of false teaching, on error and ignorance, or hatred of those who domineer and exploit."