The State, every government whatever its form, character or color – be it absolute or constitutional, monarchy or republic, Fascist, Nazi or bolshevik – is by its very nature conservative, static, intolerant of change and opposed to it.
There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can’t be.
The State is a term for the legislative and administrative machinery whereby certain business of the people is transacted, and badly so.
The State has no more existence than gods and devils have. They are equally the reflex and creation of man, for man, the individual, is the only reality. The State is but the shadow of man, the shadow of his opaqueness, of his ignorance and fear.
Lack of fairness to an opponent is essentially a sign of weakness.
We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America.
I believe – indeed, I know – that whatever is fine and beautiful in the human expresses and asserts itself in spite of government, and not because of it.
Art is a part of the rebellion against the realities of its unfulfilled desire.
Jealousy is the very reverse of understanding, of sympathy, and of generous feeling. Never has jealousy added to character, never does it make the individual big and fine.
The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class...
You cannot build up a standing army and then throw it back into a box like tin soldiers. Armies equipped to the teeth with weapons, with highly developed instruments of murder and backed by their military interests, have their own dynamic functions.
Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is more binding, more exacting.
The average mind is easily content with inherited and acquired things, or with the dicta of parents and teachers, because it is much easier to imitate than to create.
The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does not let him expand or grow.
Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to Liberty.
Why waste your life working for a few shillings a week in a scullery, eighteen hours a day, when a woman could earn a decent wage by selling her body instead?
No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law?
If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right!
If I can not dance, I want no part in your revolution.
Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race.