Johann Joseph Most > Quotes

“Anarchists are socialists because they want the improvement of society, and they are communists because they are convinced that such a transformation of society can only result from the establishment of a commonwealth of property.”
― Johann Joseph Most, An Anarchist Reader

“Taking all in all, God is, as he candidly informs us in his autobiographical chronicle — the Bible — extremely whimsical and revengeful; actually an ideal model of a despot.”
― Johann Joseph Most, An Anarchist Reader

“The so-called 'cardinal sins' are never punished with purgatory, always with hell. These include among others 'blasphemy,' perpetrated by word, by writing, or by thought. Consequently, in this direction God permit neither freedom of the press, nor speech, not even of the unspoken thought. This in itself is enough to stamp him from the outset as a successful competitor in churlishness with the basest despots and tyrants of any country or time, but the means and the duration of his punishments augment the baseness of his nature to the utmost. Consequently this God is the most atrocious monster conceivable.”
― Johann Joseph Most, An Anarchist Reader

“If, indeed, anyone should think that, in the communistic society, man must still remain under some form of compulsion in order to, do what is right, and leave off what is wrong, he had better give up communism at once and abandon all hope for the human race.”
― Johann Joseph Most, An Anarchist Reader

“When state and government have gone, laws must go. People who speak of 'laws' in a communistic society, think perhaps only of those general rules of sensible and noble conduct which every good man finds it easy to observe. But in that case they use a wrong word. A law is a rule connected with an apparatus to compel obedience. Behind the law stand the court, the sheriff, the police, the hangman, etc., and who wants them? None, we guess.”
― Johann Joseph Most, The Social Monster: A Paper On Communism And Anarchism

“Those who commit themselves all the way to the cause of social justice and anarchism must be aware that they are completely surrounded by enemies. These will take any opportunity that presents itself to destroy the revolutionaries. Comrades must remember this and always act accordingly.”
― Johann Joseph Most, Science of Revolutionary Warfare

“At all events, in a society, all of whose members are free, and equal in the true sense of the words, there is no other means than free contracts, by which to form combinations or build up relations of any kind. Compulsion by laws of any kind or in any form is absolutely excluded by the very orders of liberty and equality.”
― Johann Joseph Most, An Anarchist Reader