We take men for what they are worth – and that is why we hate the government of man by man, and that we work with all our might – perhaps not strong enough – to put an end to it.

My brother could not write about trifles. Even in society he became animated only when some serious discussion was engaged in, and he complained of feeling ‘a dull pain in the brain’ – a physical pain, as he used to say – when he was with people who cared only for small talk.

Have not prisons – which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe – always been universities of crime?

It is only by the abolition of the State, by the conquest of perfect liberty by the individual, by free agreement, association, and absolute free federation that we can reach Communism – the possession in common of our social inheritance, and the production in common of all riches.

You reason like the king, who, being sent across the frontier, called out, ‘What will become of my poor subjects without me?’

He objected, though, to indiscriminate reading. ‘One must have some question,’ he wrote, ’addressed to the book one is going to read.

Educated men – “civilized,” as Fourier used to say with disdain – tremble at the idea that society might some day be without judges, police, or gaolers.

The two great movements of our century – towards Liberty of the individual and social co-operation of the whole community – are summed up in Anarchist-Communism.

The hopeless don’t revolt, because revolution is an act of hope.

Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization.