10 Quotes by Colin Ward

The anarchist conclusion is that every kind of human activity should begin from what from what is local and immediate, should link in a network with no centre and no directing agency, hiving off new cells as the original grows.

The important question is, therefore, not whether anarchy is possible or not, but whether we can so enlarge the scope and influence of libertarian methods that they become the normal way in which human beings organise their society.

Every state protects the privileges of the powerful.

Anarchism does not demand the changing of the labels on the layers, it doesn't want different people on top, it wants us to clamber out underneath.

Anarchy is a function, not of a society’s simplicity and lack of social organization, but of it’s complexity and multiplicity of social organizations.

The terrifying breakdown of social cohesion in the American city, in spite of intense institutionalized police surveillance equipped with every sophisticated aid to public control, illustrates that social behaviour depends upon mutual responsibility rather than upon the policeman.

The fact there is no route-map to utopia does not mean that there are no routes to more accessible destinations.

The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.

American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century’s major wars. In the First World War, 5 percent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 percent, while in a Third World War 90-95 percent would be civilians.