80 quotes
The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.
I do not believe in God, because I believe in man.
Responding to audience questions during a speech in Detroit (1898)
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian.
The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.
Anarchism and Other Essays (1910)
Thinking men and women the world over are beginning to realize that patriotism is too narrow and limited a conception to meet the necessities of our time.
Anarchism and Other Essays (1910)
The majority represents a mass of cowards, willing to accept him who mirrors its own soul and mind poverty.
It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance" that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.
The Philosophy of Atheism (1916)
Resistance to tyranny is man’s highest ideal.
No real social change has ever come about without a revolution.
Anarchism and Other Essays (1910)
Today, as ever, the few are misunderstood, hounded, imprisoned, tortured, and killed.
The real pioneers in ideas, in art and in literature have remained aliens to their time, misunderstood and repudiated.
Intellectual Proletarians (1914)
The supreme effort of the avant-guard is onward, ever onward.
Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Guard (1910)
Public opinion is the omnipresent tyrant.
There are, however, 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.
Responding to audience questions during a speech in Detroit (1898)
The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.
Anarchism and Other Essays (1910)
Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.
Anarchism and Other Essays (1910)
The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.
The Individual, Society and the State (1940)
Idealists …foolish enough to throw caution to the winds… have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.
The majority cares little for ideals or integrity. What it craves is display.
Leo Tolstoy … defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.