PETER KROPOTKIN

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?

The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror.

Speak not of liberty — poverty is slavery.

Social inequality … divides society into two classes -- the wage-slaves and the grabbers of capital

More than a century has passed since science laid down sound propositions as to the origins of the universe, but how many have mastered them or possess the really scientific spirit of criticism? A few thousands at the outside, who are lost in the midst of hundreds of millions still steeped in prejudices and superstitions worthy of savages, who are consequently ever ready to serve as puppets for religious impostors.

Socialist forms of life could find a much easier realization than through the seizure of all industrial property by the State, and the State organization of agriculture and industry.

Freedom remains still the wisest cure for freedom's temporary inconveniences.

Neither the crushing powers of the centralized State nor the teachings of mutual hatred ... could weed out the feeling of human solidarity, deeply lodged in men's understanding and heart, because it has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution.

Parliamentarianism is nauseating to anyone who has ever seen it at close range.

The law has no claim to human respect; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.

America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.

The priest accustoms the child to the idea of law, to make it obey better what he calls the "divine law," and the lawyer prates of divine law, that the civil law may be the better obeyed.

Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against privilege they are thrown overboard.

If we ... ask Nature: "Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another? We see at once that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive.

Workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.

Governmental Communism … is repugnant to the worker.

In primitive Buddhism, in primitive Christianity, in the writings of some of the Moslem teachers, in the early movements of the Reform, and especially in the ethical and philosophical movements of the last century and of our own times, the total abandonment of the idea of revenge, or of "due reward" — of good for good and evil for evil — is affirmed more and more vigorously. The higher conception of "no revenge for wrongs," and of freely giving more than one expects to receive from his neighbors, is proclaimed as being the real principle of morality — a principle superior to mere equivalence, equity, or justice, and more conducive to happiness … In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race.

One single war — we all know — may be productive of more evil, immediate and subsequent, than hundreds of years of the unchecked action of the mutual-aid principle may be productive of good.

The uncertainty of Socialists themselves concerning the organization of the society they are wishing for, paralyses their energy

The masses have never believed in sophisms taught by economists, uttered more to confirm exploiters in their rights than to convert the exploited!

It is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists … poverty is slavery!

The absorption of all social functions by the State necessarily favored the development of an unbridled, narrow-minded, individualism.

Vladimir Ilyich, your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.

…the more miserable a man is, the more he dreads every sort of change, lest it make him more wretched still.

The moral sense is a natural faculty in us like the sense of smell or of touch.