Anarchy Quotes

A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.

Gilles Deleuze

If the government becomes a law breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means 'to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal' would bring terrible retribution.From dissenting opinion in Olmstead vs. United States, in which the court upheld the use of wiretaps in a case involving an investigation of bootlegging. Brandeis strongly defended the individual right to privacy from government intrusion.

Louis D. Brandeis, 1928

Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.

Friedrich Nietzsche

One of the few things my father says when he's had a few that I agree with is that kids don't have much balls in this generation. Some of them are trying to start the revolution by bombing U.S. government washrooms, but none of them are throwing Molotov cocktails at the Pentagon.

Stephen King

The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The consistent anarchist should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. Some sort of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is largely a sham when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers, and technocrats, a vanguard party, or a State bureaucracy.

Noam Chomsky

When politics and home life have become one and the same thing, [...] then,[...] it is evident that we will be in a state of total liberty or anarchy.

Leo Tolstoy

Ever reviled, accursed, ne'er understood,Thou art the grisly terror of our age.Wreck of all order, cry the multitude,Art thou, and war and murder's endless rage.O, let them cry. To them that ne'er have strivenThe truth that lies behind a word to find,To them the word's right meaning was not given.They shall continue blind among the blind.But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so pure,Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken.I give thee to the future! Thine secureWhen each at least unto himself shall waken.Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest's thrill?I cannot tell--but it the earth shall see!I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I willNot rule, and also ruled I will not be!

John Henry Mackay, Anarchy

Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline, fear, or punishment, and without the pressure of poverty: a new social organism which will make an end to the terrible struggle for the means of existence, --the savage struggle which undermines the finest qualities in man, and ever widens the social abyss. In short, Anarchism strives towards a social organization which will establish well-being for all.

Emma Goldman

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

William Shakespeare

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.

George Bernard Shaw

People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.

Oscar Wilde

Anarchists are mouthpieces of a declining stratum of society; when they work themselves into a state of righteous indignation demanding 'rights', 'justice', 'equal rights', they are just acting under the pressure of their own lack of culture, which has no way of grasping why they really suffer, or what they lack in life.

Friedrich Nietzsche

My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm -- as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy.

Camille Anna Paglia

It was at a particular moment in the history of my own rages that I saw the Western world conditioned by the images of Marx, Darwin and Freud; and Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western world. The simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.

William Golding

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. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man.

Emma Goldman