372 Quotes by Emma Goldman

Referring to the American government, the greatest American Anarchist, David Thoreau, said: “Government, what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instance losing its integrity; it has not the vitality and force of a single living man. Law never made man a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made agents of injustice.

Religion is a superstition that originated in man’s mental inability to solve natural phenomena. The Church is an orgainized institution that has always been stumbling to block progress.

More pernicious than the power of a dictator is that of a class; the most terrible – the tyranny of a majority.

Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world, the mottos of which are: “To take is more blessed than to give”; “buy cheap and sell dear”; “one soiled hand washes the other.

There’s never been a good government.

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.

In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.

Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.

There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can’t be.