Anarchists Quotes

My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists ; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism . ~ Aldous Huxley

When the injunction was issued in Birmingham, our failure to obey it bewildered our opponents. They did not know what to do. We did not hide our intentions. In fact, I announced our plan to the press, pointing out that we were not anarchists advocating lawlessness, but that it was obvious to us that the courts of Alabama had misused the judicial process in order to perpetuate injustice and segregation. Consequently, we could not, in good conscience, obey their findings. I intended to be one of the first to set ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Never will the Anarchists in Spain be made to suffer as they have been and are in Russia. ~ Federica Montseny

Rebellion against technology and civilization is real rebellion, a real attack on the values of the existing system. But the green anarchists, anarcho-primitivists, and so forth (The "GA Movement") have fallen under such heavy influence from the left that their rebellion against civilization has to great extent been neutralized. Instead of rebelling against the values of civilization, they have adopted many civilized values themselves and have constructed an imaginary picture of primitive societies that embodies these civilized values. ~ Theodore Kaczynski

All anarchists believe in worker's control, in the sense of individuals deciding what work whey do, how they work, and who they work with. This follows logically from the anarchist belief that nobody should be subject to a boss. ~ Donald Rooum

I wish to say that we Anarchists have never changed our position. We are Anarchists as of old and still pursue the same ideals. ~ Federica Montseny

Anarchists have taken over (the GOP). ~ Harry Reid

The Anarchists' [national] anthem is an international anthem that consists of 365 raspberries blown in very quick succession to the tune of Camptown Races. Nobody has to stand up for it, nobody has to listen to it, and, even better, nobody has to play it. ~ Mike Harding

With their concern for personal autonomy and individual freedom, anarchists more than any other socialists are aware of the inhumanity of both physical punishment and manipulative cure for anti-social members of the community. They look to reasoned argument and friendly treatment to deal with criminals and wish to respect their humanity and individuality. ~ Peter Marshall

One of the problems with dealing with anarchism is that there are many people whose ideas are anarchist, but who do not necessarily call themselves anarchists. ~ Howard Zinn

The boycott of parliamentary institutions on the part of anarchists and semianarchists is dictated by a desire not to submit their weakness to a test on the part of the masses, thus preserving their right to an inactive hauteur which makes no difference to anybody. A revolutionary party can turn its back to a parliament only if it has set itself the immediate task of overthrowing the existing regime. ~ Leon Trotsky

Think of the power we could have if all the energy and effort in the world – or maybe even just your energy and effort? – that goes into drinking were put into resisting, building, creating. Try adding up all the money anarchists in your community have spent on corporate libations, and picture how much musical equipment or bail money or food it could have paid for – instead of funding their war against all of us. ~ CrimethInc.

Anarchism as the name for an ideal total social form is a really complicated question. I have never found satisfying answers from anarchists about the definition of the state they are opposed to. Most are opposed to coercive forms of state power. Questions about large scale systems of organization and how they will be funded - those are questions it's hard to get anarchists to give good answers to. ~ Cynthia Kauffman

Living more lives than one, knowing people of all classes, all shades of opinion, monarchists, republicans, socialists, anarchists, has had a salutary effect on my mind. If every year of my life, every month of the year, I had lived with reformers and crusaders I should be, by this time, a fanatic. As it is I have had such varied things to do, I have had so many different contacts that I am not even very much of a crank. ~ Rheta Childe Dorr

Very few philosophers have been anarchists ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

In the matter of the maintenance and rearing of children the Anarchists would neither institute the communistic nursery which the State Socialists favor nor keep the communistic school system which now prevails. ~ Benjamin Tucker

Do you play tennis? Anarchists play a lot of tennis. And Counts do too. Counts and anarchists are the kind of people who, right now, play tennis most. ~ Unai Elorriaga

We must institute a coup d'etat, a third revolution, which must beat down anarchy. Dissolve the Paris Commune and destroy its sections! Dissolve the clubs, which preach disorder and equality! Close the Jacobin Club and seal up its papers! ... The triumvirate of Robespierre, Danton and Marat, all the 'levellers', all the anarchists. Then a new Convention will be elected. ~ Jacques Pierre Brissot

While the popular understanding of anarchism is of a violent, anti-State movement, anarchism is a much more subtle and nuanced tradition then a simple opposition to government power. Anarchists oppose the idea that power and domination are necessary for society, and instead advocate more co-operative, anti-hierarchical forms of social, political and economic organisation. ~ L. Susan Brown

Anarchists are mouthpieces of a declining stratum of society; when they work themselves into a state of righteous indignation demanding 'rights', 'justice', 'equal rights', they are just acting under the pressure of their own lack of culture, which has no way of grasping why they really suffer, or what they lack in life. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In the sixties, during the Vietnam war, when anarchists and pacifists and socialists, Democrats and Republicans, decent-hearted Americans, all recoiled with horror at the bloodbath, we came together. ~ Pete Seeger

Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. ~ Benjamin Tucker

It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring no police, no army, no guardians of morality, and no government. The old Deity being dead and dethroned, Humankind would come at last into power. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

When anarchy is declared, the first thing we do, let's kill all the anarchists. ~ Craig Bruce

The Anarchists answer that the abolition of the State will leave in existence a defensive association, resting no longer on a compulsory but on a voluntary basis, which will restrain invaders by any means that may prove necessary. ~ Benjamin Tucker

That's the way our friends the anarchists talk. Whenever things get really bad they want to set fire to something and to die. ~ Ernest Hemingway

Dynamite, which was invented in 1867 by Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, was a godsend for anarchists and other militants, since it was a powerful weapon that was easy to conceal. Nobel was so dismayed to see his invention used for violent purposes - he had intended it to be used for peaceful endeavors such as construction - that he left millions of dollars in his will to establish the annual Nobel Prizes, including the Nobel Peace Prize. ~ Jeffrey D. Simon

We believe that the Anarchists are real enemies of Marxism. ~ Joseph Stalin

Demonstrations must be dignified and nonviolent, as the overwhelming protests in Ferguson and Staten Island have been. Do not confuse anarchists who don't want the system to work and thugs who want to exploit a situation with the majority who from day one have operated with impeccable nonviolence and clear goals. ~ Al Sharpton

To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised;
even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the
face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said
'Sen~or' or 'Don' ort even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos
dias'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture
from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the
trams and taxis and much of the other t ~ George Orwell

This excessive licence, which the anarchists think is the only true freedom, provides the stock, as it were, from which a tyrant grows. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

We love the indomitable bellicose patriotism that sets you apart; we love the national pride that guides your muscularly courageous race; we love the potent individualism that doesn't prevent you from opening your arms to individualists of every land, whether libertarians or anarchists. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

So long as anarchy is synonymous with chaos and despair, the Anarchists will always be synonymous with villains. ~ Marissa Meyer

We will not be derailed by criminal anarchists who legitimately claim a religious cause. ~ John F. Kerry

Anarchists are opposed to violence; everyone knows that. The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. It is life based on freedom of the individual, without the intervention of the gendarme. For this reason we are the enemies of capitalism which depends on the protection of the gendarme to oblige workers to allow themselves to be exploited
or even to remain idle and go hungry when it is not in the interest of the bosses to exploit them. We are therefore enemies of the State which is the coercive violent organization of society. ~ Errico Malatesta

Even the fiercest of anarchists lose their teeth to age. ~ Cari Luna

The Sabbat arose as a conspiracy to destroy the rotten edifice of Church and State, meeting on the heath to avoid the gaze of authority, guised in anonymity and foreboding. This revolutionized the nature of witchcraft, regardless of the pre-existence of the Sabbat form. I do not simply refer here to the inspiring fantasies of Jules Michelet, but the important modern work of Silvia Federici. We see the same attacks on freedom of assembly in the destruction of the free festivals, rave culture and the occupy movement. These have been met by the masked Anonymous, the faceless black bloc anarchists, the direct actions of the ELF. These are expressions of popular witchcraft and have been persecuted by the same inquisition that came for us. I do not say that these are examples of operative witchcraft, I say that we, the people who are the Witchcraft, have a sacred duty to join this war. We need to celebrate Grand Sabbats again, infuse them with our witchblood, our cunning. ~ Peter Grey

There are Anarchists in other parts of the world who are unable to, comprehend the position of the Spanish Anarchists. I do not pretend to censor these Anarchists. ~ Federica Montseny

I think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don't have to learn."
Vokep shook his head grimly. "It's the kids," he said. "Having babies. Makes 'em propertarians. They won't let go." He sighed. "Touch and go, brother, that's the rule. Don't ever let yourself be owned. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Anarchists are extreme libertarian socialists , "libertarian" meaning the demand for freedom from prohibition, and "socialist" meaning the demand for social equality ... Complete freedom implies equality, since if there are rich and poor, the poor cannot be permitted to take liberties with riches. Complete equality implies freedom, since those who suffer restrictions cannot be the equals of those who impose them. ~ Donald Rooum

Plantie is a very strong Protestant, that is to say, he's against all churches, especially the Protestant: and he thinks a lot of Buddha, Karma and Confucius. He is also a bit of an anarchist and three or four years ago he took up Einstein and vitamins. ~ Joyce Cary

I had displeased the jacobins by blaming their aristocratic usurpation of legitimate powers; the priests of all sorts by claiming religious liberty; the anarchists by repressing them; and the conspirators by rejecting their offers. ~ Marquis De Lafayette

You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong - to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires. You do not know the real world in which you live, and your thinking has no place in the real world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental aberration. ~ Jack London

We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical. ~ Murray Rothbard

No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing. ~ Louis Aragon

In a world where inequality of ability is inevitable, anarchists do not sanction any attempt to produce equality by artificial or authoritarian means. The only equality they posit and will strive their utmost to defend is the equality of opportunity. This necessitates the maximum amount of freedom for each individual. This will not necessarily result in equality of incomes or wealth but will result in returns proportionate to service rendered. ~ Laurance Labadie

Anarchists prepare for social revolution and use every means- speech, writing, or deed, whichever is more to the point - to accelerate revolutionary development. ~ Johann Most

Freedom, or individual liberty, was a basic premise of the Spanish anarchist tradition. "Individual sovereignty" is a prime tenet of most anarchist writing; the free development of one' s individual potential is one of the basic "rights" to which all humans are born. Yet Spanish anarchists were firmly rooted in the communalist-anarchist tradition. For them, freedom was fundamentally a social product: the fullest expression of individuality and of creativity can be achieved only in and through community. As Carmen Conde (a teacher who was also active in Mujeres Libres) wrote, describing the relationship of individuality and community: "I and my truth; I and my faith ... And I for you, but without ever ceasing to be me, so that you can always be you. Because I don' t exist without your existence, but my existence is also indispensable to yours. ~ Martha A. Ackelsberg

Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up. I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men - white male corporate society. So why wouldn't a woman want to rebel against that? ~ Kim Gordon

The villains' poor life choices weren't exactly the bees' fault, after all. ~ Marissa Meyer

The Algerian fidaï, unlike the unbalanced anarchists made famous in literature, does not take dope. The fidaï does not need to be unaware of danger, to befog his consciousness, or to forgot. The "terrorist," from the moment he undertakes an assignment, allows death to enter into his soul. He has a rendezvous with death.The fidaï, on the other hand, has a rendezvous with the life of the Revolution, and with his own life. The fidaï is not one of the sacrificed. To be sure, he does not shrink before the possibility of losing his life or the independence of his country, but at no moment does he choose death. ~ Frantz Fanon

That the American police can perjure themselves with the same ease, that they are just as merciless, just as brutal and cunning as their European colleagues, has been proven on more than one occasion. We need only recall the tragedy of the eleventh of November, 1887, known as the Haymarket Riot. No one who is at all familiar with the case can possibly doubt that the Anarchists, judicially murdered in Chicago, died as victims of a lying, bloodthirsty press and of a cruel police conspiracy. Has not Judge Gary himself said: Not because you have caused the Haymarket bomb, but because you are Anarchists, you are on trial. ~ Emma Goldman

I am an anarchist in a totally different category from that of all anarchists who ever lived on the face of the earth.
I am a category consisting of myself, because my focus is completely different.
I am not against the government, I'm against the need for government.
I am not against the courts, I am against the need for courts.
Someday, sometime, I see the need for man to be able to live without any control - religious or political - as it will be a discipline in itself. ~ Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

You cling so tightly to your purity, my lad! How terrified you are of sullying your hands. Well, go ahead then, stay pure! What good will it do, and why even bother coming here among us? Purity is a concept of fakirs and friars. But you, the intellectuals, the bourgeois anarchists, you invoke purity as your rationalization for doing nothing. Do nothing, don't move, wrap your arms tight around your body, put on your gloves. As for myself, my hands
are dirty. I have plunged my arms up to the elbows in excrement and blood. And what else should one do? Do you suppose that it is possible to govern
innocently? ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Among the fundamental likeness between the Revolutionary Republicans and the Anarchists is the recognition that the little must precede the great; that the local must be the basis of the general; that there can be a free federation only when there are free communities to federate; that the spirit of the latter is carried into the councils of the former, and a local tyranny may thus become an instrument for general enslavement. ~ Voltairine De Cleyre

When a journalist pressed Werner for a clear answer on the "Is Earth f**ked" question, he set the jargon aside and replied, "More or less."4 There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner described it as "resistance" - movements of "people or groups of people" who "adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture." According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes "environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by Indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups." Such mass uprisings of people - along the lines of the abolition movement and the civil rights movement - represent the likeliest source of "friction" to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. ~ Naomi Klein

Socialists find me too far left; Trotskyites not far enough; ecologists say I am too happy eating foie gras, defending nuclear energy and GM plants; feminists find I am not enough of a woman; anarchists a petit-bourgeois who has sold out because I believe in universal suffrage. ~ Michel Onfray

We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves. ~ Errico Malatesta

We're not anarchists," she said. "We have goals. We want to end the Empire."
"And replace it with what?
"You know what," Scarlet said. Her crossed arms matched his own. "Are you trying to make fun of me?"
"It was rhetorical. I've heard the speech, sweetheart. 'A glorious return to the Republic of old.' To a guy like me, a new boss is still a boss. ~ James S.A. Corey

When you have been just told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

OLD MARX He can't think. London is damp, in every room someone coughs. He never did like winter. He rewrites past manuscripts time and again, without passion. The yellow paper is fragile as consumption. Why does life race stubbornly toward destruction? But spring returns in dreams, with snow that doesn't speak in any known tongue. And where does love fit within his system? Where you find blue flowers. He despises anarchists, idealists bore him. He receives reports from Russia, far too detailed. The French grow rich. Poland is common and quiet. America never stops growing. Blood is everywhere, perhaps the wallpaper needs changing. He begins to suspect that poor humankind will always trudge across the old earth like the local lunatic shaking her fists at an unseen God. ~ Adam Zagajewski

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. ~ Maria Nikiforova

The antiwar movement is a wild orgasm of anarchists sweeping across the country like a prairie fire. ~ Richard M. Nixon

Unless a convention of anarchists visited the library yesterday, most books ought to be in their rightful places. ~ Evelyn Skye

The Anarchists' uncompromising rejection of the State, the subject of Marxian sneers for its "absolutist" and "Utopian" character, makes much better sense in the present era than the Marxist relativist and historical approach. The pacifists also seem to be more realistic than the Marxist both in their understanding of modern war and also in their attempts to do something about it ... ~ Dwight Macdonald

The anarchists, on behalf of the proletariat, therefore consider it necessary to show the proletariat that it will have to win a gigantic battle before it realizes its goals. ~ Johann Most

A Signal"

Anarchists in 1921 Cuba



Cuban anarchists started to gain strength as early as 1921, when they handed out pamphlets and periodicals on the streets. In its ltimate form, anarchists seek freedom not only from government but also from any infringement of their ideologies, such as religion and capitalism. They believe that they should be able to do whatever they want to, as long as it does not interfere with others, although bomb throwing and shooting people in the streets certainly seemed acceptable to them. From Page 128 of "The Exciting Story of Cuba" Captain Hank Bracker ~ Hank Bracker

THE NEXT DAY Reef, Cyprian, and Ratty were out on the Anarchists' golf course, during a round of Anarchists' Golf, a craze currently sweeping the civilized world, in which there was no fixed sequence - in fact, no fixed number - of holes, with distances flexible as well, some holes being only putter-distance apart, others uncounted hundreds of yards and requiring a map and compass to locate. Many players had been known to come there at night and dig new ones. Parties were likely to ask, "Do you mind if we don't play through?" then just go and whack balls at any time and in any direction they liked. Folks were constantly being beaned by approach shots barreling in from unexpected quarters. "This is kind of fun," Reef said, as an ancient brambled guttie went whizzing by, centimeters from his ear. ~ Thomas Pynchon

My face on every coin engraved, the anarchists are all enslaved. My flag is forever waved, by the grateful people I have saved. ~ Don McLean

GEOLOGY, n. The science of the earth's crust
to which, doubtless, will be added that of its interior whenever a man shall come up garrulous out of a well. The geological formations of the globe already noted are catalogued thus: The Primary, or lower one, consists of rocks, bones or mired mules, gas-pipes, miners' tools, antique statues minus the nose, Spanish doubloons and ancestors. The Secondary is largely made up of red worms and moles. The Tertiary comprises railway tracks, patent pavements, grass, snakes, mouldy boots, beer bottles, tomato cans, intoxicated citizens, garbage, anarchists, snap-dogs and fools. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb. ~ Spiro T. Agnew

Years ago in 1959 when Dellinger was already an editor on Liberation (then an anarchist-pacifist magazine, of worthy but not very readable articles in more or less vegetarian prose) Mailer had submitted a piece, after some solicitation, on the contrast between real obscenity in advertising, and alleged obscenity in four-letter words. The piece was no irreplaceable work of prose, and in fact was eventually inserted quietly into his book, Advertisements for Myself, but it created difficulty for the editorial board at Liberation, since there was a four-letter word he had used to make his point, the palpable four-letter word which signifies a woman's most definitive organ: these editorial anarchists were decorous; they were ready to overthrow society and replace it with a communion of pacifistic men free of all laws, but they were not ready to print cunt. ~ Norman Mailer

There are some libertarians who are really anarchists, but others are more concerned about the distant relationship between themselves and power. They mistakenly think they want to get rid of government when instead they might just want to have greater access to power. ~ Zephyr Teachout

Both Bratva and thieves in law would like to call themselves nihilists and anarchists because they don't support the established government, but they govern nonetheless, and you can't be an anarchist unless you follow its rule. Crime and anarchy are no more synonymous than nihilism and existentialism, or fatalism and determinism; so many isms there was bound to be a schism. ~ Tanya Thompson

They [anarchists and radical environmentalists] point out that the state and its philosophers, having retrospectively sold us a social contract we never saw nor signed, seem anyway to have reneged on their side of the bargain which was to protect our lives and liberties. The new institutionally guaranteed 'freedoms', to democracy, free speech, individual liberty, so dearly brought, constantly fail to live up to expectation. What does it mean to have political freedom when the parties on offer are ideologically identical clones? What kind of intellectual freedom is it that brands all those who dare to think differently dangerous extremists? What kind of individuality expects us all to conform within such narrow limits? What freedoms are even possible when the very air we breathe is poisoned and the food we eat contaminated with the so-called 'by-products' of progress? In such circumstances, it is surely not surprising that some might choose the dream of pre-contractual state of natural innocence to the increasingly nightmarish 'reality' of Locke's post-contractual culture. ~ Mick Smith

At Snortin' Reformatory, a notorious Washington, D.C. jail located in the northern Virginia suburbs, The Afro-Anarchists were being thrown into a cell. It was a situation that the three of them, like many young black males in the D.C. area, had long ago come to expect as a rite of passage.
As the door slammed shut behind them, Bucktooth spoke. "Man, Phosphate, they didn't read us our rights or nothin'."
"Yeah, Phos," Fontaine chimed in, "I didn't think they had to beat us, neither. And whoever heard of being charged with singing too loud and off-key in a public establishment? I don't believe there is no kind of law for that shit. ~ Donald Jeffries

Whether we immoralists do any harm to virtue?-Just as little as anarchists do to princes. It is only because they have been shot at that they once again sit securely on their thrones. Moral: we must shoot at morals. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Regarding the need to pray, the anarch is again no different from anyone else. But he does not like to attach himself. He does not squander his best energies. He accepts no substitute for his gold. He knows his freedom, and also what it is worth its weight in. The equation balances when he is offered something credible. The result is ONE.

There can be no doubt that gods have appeared, not only in ancient times but even late in history; they feasted with us and fought at our sides. But what good is the splendor of bygone banquets to a starving man? What good is the clinking of gold that a poor man hears through the wall of time? The gods must be called.

The anarch lets all this be; he can bide his time. He has his ethos, but not morals. He recognizes lawfulness, but not the law; he despises rules. Whenever ethos goes into shalts and shalt-nots, it is already corrupted. Still, it can harmonize with them, depending on location and circumstances, briefly or at length, just as I harmonize here with the tyrant for as long as I like.

One error of the anarchists is their belief that human nature is intrinsically good. They thereby castrate society, just as the theologians ("God is goodness") castrate the Good Lord. ~ Ernst Junger

The modern day anarchists known as the Tea Party, they believe in no government. ~ Harry Reid

The history of the thing might amuse you," he said. "When first I became one of the New Anarchists I tried all kinds of respectable disguises. I dressed up as a bishop. I read up all about bishops in our anarchist pamphlets, in Superstition the Vampire and Priests of Prey. I certainly understood from them that bishops are strange and terrible old men keeping a cruel secret from mankind. I was misinformed. When on my first appearing in episcopal gaiters in a drawing-room I cried out in a voice of thunder, 'Down! down! presumptuous human reason!' they found out in some way that I was not a bishop at all. I was nabbed at once. Then I made up as a millionaire; but I defended Capital with so much intelligence that a fool could see that I was quite poor. Then I tried being a major. Now I am a humanitarian myself, but I have, I hope, enough intellectual breadth to understand the position of those who, like Nietzsche, admire violence--the proud, mad war of Nature and all that, you know. I threw myself into the major. I drew my sword and waved it constantly. I called out 'Blood!' abstractedly, like a man calling for wine. I often said, 'Let the weak perish; it is the Law.' Well, well, it seems majors don't do this. I was nabbed again. At last I went in despair to the President of the Central Anarchist Council, who is the greatest man in Europe. ~ G.K. Chesterton

As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.
There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a 'leveller' on which the 'fit' survive and stragglers fall by the wayside.
The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The 'dictators' of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the 'gentlemen of the road'. ~ Bruce Chatwin

She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Leisel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist's suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she touched his mouth with her fingers ... She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on ... ~ Markus Zusak

Any one who tells you that Anarchists don't believe in organization is talking nonsense. Organization is everything, and everything is organization. ~ Alexander Berkman

Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!
-after the split between Anarchists and Marxists in 1872 ~ Otto Von Bismarck

There may be thunder in Europe but it is in America the lightning will fall ~ Ambrose Bierce

The ownership of land is not natural. The American savage, ranging through forests who game and timber are the common benefits of all his kind, fails to comprehend it. The nomad traversing the desert does not ask to whom belong the shifting sands that extend around him as far as the horizon. The Caledonian shepherd leads his flock to graze wherever a patch of nutritious greenness shows amidst the heather. All of these recognise authority. They are not anarchists. They have chieftains and overlords to whom they are as romantically devoted as any European subject might be to a monarch. Nor do they hold as the first Christians did, that all land should be held in common. Rather, they do not consider it as a thing that can be parceled out.

"We are not so innocent. When humanity first understood that a man's strength could create good to be marketed, that a woman's beauty was itself a commodity for trade, then slavery was born. So since Adam learnt to force the earth to feed him, fertile ground has become too profitable to be left in peace.

"This vital stuff that lives beneath our feet is a treasury of all times. The past: it is packed with metals and sparkling stones, riches made by the work of aeons. The future: it contains seeds and eggs: tight-packed promises which will unfurl into wonders more fantastical than ever jeweller dreamed of -- the scuttling centipede, the many-branched tree whose roots, fumbling down into darkness, are as large and cunningly ~ Lucy Hughes-Hallett

The superannuated anarchist Kropotkin, made use of the war to disavow everything he had been teaching for almost half a century. This denouncer of the state supported the Entente, and if he denounced the dual power in Russia, it was not in the name of anarchy, but in the name of a single core of the bourgeoisie. ~ Leon Trotsky

More raiders came down the stairs prodding the Reverend Dr. Lionel J. D. Jones, the Black Fuehrer, and Father Keeley before them.
Dr. Jones stopped halfway down the stairs, confronted his tormentors. 'All I've done, 'he said majestically, 'is do what you people should be doing.'
'What should we be doing?' said a G-man. He was obviously in command of the raid.
'Protecting the Republic,' said Jones. 'Why bother us? Everything we do is to make the country stronger! Join with us, and let's go after the people who are trying to make it weaker!'
'Who's that?' said the G-man.
'I have to tell you?' said Jones. 'Haven't you even found that in the course of your work? The Jews! The Catholics! The Negroes! The Orientals! The Unitarians! The foreign-born, who don't have any understanding of democracy, who play right into the hands of the socialists, the communists, the anarchists, the anti-Christs and the Jews!'
'For your information,' said the G-man in cool triumph, 'I am a Jew.'
'That proves what I've just been saying!' said Jones.
'How's that?', said the G-man.
'The Jews have infiltrated everything!' said Jones, smiling the smile of a logician who could never be topped.
'You talk about the Catholics and the Negroes-' said the G-man, 'and yet your two best friends are a Catholic and a Negro.'
'What's so mysterious about that?' said Jones.
'Don't you hate them?', said the G-man.
'Certainly not,' said Jones. 'We all believe ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

McGovern is very sensitive about this sort of thing, and for excellent reason. In three of the last four big primaries (Ohio, Nebraska & California) he has spent an alarmingly big chunk of his campaign time denying that behind his calm and decent facade he is really a sort of Trojan Horse candidate - coming on in public as a bucolic Jeffersonian Democrat while secretly plotting to seize the reins of power and turn them over at midnight on Inauguration Day to a Red-bent hellbroth of radicals, Dopers, Traitors, Sex Fiends, Anarchists, Winos, and "extremists" of every description. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

All these young millionaires were anarchists, of course: when a man possesses everything it is the supreme luxury for him to deny society: for in that way he can evade his responsibilities ~ Romain Rolland

During the first two months of the war it was the Anarchists more than anyone else who had saved the situation, and much later than this the Anarchist militia, in spite of their indiscipline, were notoriously the best fighters among the purely Spanish forces. ~ George Orwell

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

So you talk about the mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the baron's wars. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Anarchists are socialists because they want the improvement of society, and they are communists because they are convinced that such a transformation of society can only result from the establishment of a commonwealth of property. ~ Johann Most

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

If your political theory requires humanity to "evolve", then you do not have a theory. ~ A.E. Samaan

If anarchy is chaos, and chaos is war, why wasn't a single war started by anarchists? ~ Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

I would also say that, in practice, many more Americans are anarchists than would ever use that term. ~ Bell Hooks