Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization.
Where there is authority, there is no freedom.
The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.
In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it.
When we ask for the abolition of the State and its organs we are always told that we dream of a society composed of men better than they are in reality. But no; a thousand times, no. All we ask is that men should not be made worse than they are, by such institutions!
When we have but the will to do it, that very moment will Justice be done: that very instant the tyrants of the Earth shall bite the dust.
Think about the world you want to live and work in. What do you need to know to build the world? Demand that your teachers teach you that.
No evolution is accomplished in nature without revolution. Periods of very slow changes are succeeded by periods of violent changes. Revolutions are as necessary for evolution as the slow changes which prepare them and succeed them.
Men passionately desire to live after death, but they often pass away without noticing the fact that the memory of a really good person always lives. It is impressed upon the next generation, and is transmitted again to the children. Is that not an immortality worth striving for?
I understand regicide as a means of obtaining vengeance for the ruin of our lives, but regicide as a means of obtaining political freedom I could never understand.
It is only those who do nothing who makes no mistake.
True progress lies in the direction of decentralization, both territorial and functional, in the development of the spirit of local and personal initiative, and of free federation from the simple to the compound, in lieu of the present hierarchy from the centre to the periphery.
The immense and ever increasing sums which the state wrings from the people are never enough for it; it mortgages the income of future generations, and steers resolutely toward bankruptcy.
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 the privileged they are overthrown.
Waste of time is the leading feature of our present education. Not only are we taught a mass of rubbish, but what is not rubbish is taught so as to make us waste over it as much time as possible.
As an anarchist, I cannot reconcile myself to any government.
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.
Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state.
When one has talent, everything contributes to its development.
Poverty, the existence of the poor, was the first cause of riches.