15 Quotes by Emma Goldman about Anarchism

  • Author Emma Goldman
  • Quote

    Not only my arrest but the others smack of the Haymarket. The police are very much in disrepute all over the country, and they wish to do something to clear themselves. They are trying to make it an anarchist plot. If they wish to make up a case, they may succeed.

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  • Author Emma Goldman
  • Quote

    Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only 'order' that governments have ever maintained.

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  • Author Emma Goldman
  • Quote

    The contention that a standing army and navy is the best security of peace is about as logical as the claim that the most peaceful citizen is he who goes about heavily armed.

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  • Author Emma Goldman
  • Quote

    Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony.

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  • Author Emma Goldman
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    There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another. This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.

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  • Author Emma Goldman
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    Destruction and violence! How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance; that its power of destruction is the very thing Anarchism is combating? Nor is he aware that Anarchism, whose roots, as it were, are part of nature's forces, destroys, not healthful tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life's essence of society. It is merely clearing the soil from weeds and sagebrush, that it may eventually bear healthy fruit.

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