85 Quotes by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Property is impossible.

To name a thing is easy: the difficulty is to discern it before its appearance.

The notion of anarchy ...means that once industrial functions have taken over from political functions, then business transactions and exchange alone produce the social order.

As soon as I set foot in the parliamentary Sinai, I ceased to be in touch with the masses.

All men in their hearts, I say, bear witness to these truths; they need only to be made to understand it.

Anarchy is... a form of government or constitution in which public and private consciousness , formed through the development of science and law , is alone sufficient to maintain order and guarantee all liberties.

Communism--the first expression of the social nature--is the first term of social development--the thesis; property, the reverse of communism, is the second term--the antithesis. When we have discovered the third term, the synthesis, we shall have the required solution.

Tormented by conflicting feelings, I appealed to reason ; and it is reason which, amid so many dogmatic contradictions, now forces the hypothesis upon me. A priori dogmatism, applying itself to God, has proved fruitless: who knows whither the hypothesis, in its turn, will lead us? I will explain therefore how, studying in the silence of my heart, and far from every human consideration, the mystery of social revolutions, God, the great unknown, has become for me an hypothesis, I mean a necessary dialectical tool.

The elements of justice are identical with those of algebra.