38 Quotes by Murray Bookchin

Anarchism is not only a stateless society but also a harmonized society that exposes man to the stimuli provided by both agrarian and urban life, to physical activity and mental activity, to unrepressed sensuality and self-directed spirituality, to communal solidarity and individual development, to regional uniqueness and worldwide brotherhood, to spontaneity and self-discipline, to the elimination of toil and the promotion of craftsmanship.

It is impossible to achieve a harmonization of man and nature without creating a human community that lives in a lasting balance with its natural environment.

Too often, ideas meant to yield a certain practice are instead transported into the academy, as fare for ‘enriching’ a curriculum and, of course, generating jobs for the growing professoriat.

Power to the people' can onlybe put into practice when the power exercised by social elites isdissolved into the people. Each individual can then take control ofhis daily life. If 'Power to the people' means nothing more thanpower to the 'leaders' of the people, then the people remain anundifferentiated, manipulatable mass, as powerless after the revolution as they were before. In the last analysis, the people can neverhave power until they disappear as a 'people.

The truth, indeed, is out—but the ears to hear it and the minds to learn from it seem to have been atrophied by a cultivated ignorance and a nearly total loss of critical insight.

As long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction.

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.

To speak of limits to growth under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society.