We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens.
Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one.
It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice, which drives the political offender to act.
Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.
The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings as in his native land.
Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.
The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.
Idealists foolish enough to throw caution to the winds have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.
One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; the extreme thing is generally the true thing.
Crime is naught but misdirected energy.
When we can’t dream any longer we die.
Direct action is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.
Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.
Free love? as if love is anything but free. Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love.
The history of human growth is at the same time the history of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn, and the brighter dawn has always been considered illegal, outside of the law.
Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man’s subordination.
Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in.
They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.
It is significant that whenever the public mind is to be diverted from great social wrong, a crusade is inaugurated against indecency.
In the face of this approaching disaster, it behooves men and women not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them.
We shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next door neighbors should hear that freeborn citizens dare not speak in the open.