Pyotr Kropotkin > Quotes

“Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state.”
― Peter Kropotkin, In Russian and French Prisons

“It is only those who do nothing who makes no mistake.”
― Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings

“The means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective property of the race. Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all. All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate every one's part in the production of the world's wealth.
All things are for all. Here is an immense stock of tools and implements; here are all those iron slaves which we call machines, which saw and plane, spin and weave for us, unmaking and remaking, working up raw matter to produce the marvels of our time. But nobody has the right to seize a single one of these machines and say, "This is mine; if you want to use it you must pay me a tax on each of your products," any more than the feudal lord of medieval times had the right to say to the peasant, "This hill, this meadow belong to me, and you must pay me a tax on every sheaf of corn you reap, on every rick you build."
All is for all! If the man and the woman bear their fair share of work, they have a right to their fair share of all that is produced by all, and that share is enough to secure them well-being. No more of such vague formulas as "The Right to work," or "To each the whole result of his labour." What we proclaim is The Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All!”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

“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? ”
― Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist

“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.”
― Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

“variety is life; uniformity is death”
― peter kropotkin

“Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. 'Read poetry,' he wrote: 'poetry makes men better.' How often, in my later life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better.”
― Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist

“Don’t compete! — competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

“Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none.”
― Peter Kropotkin

“It is not difficult, indeed, to see the absurdity of naming a few men and saying to them, "Make laws regulating all our spheres of activity, although not one of you knows anything about them!”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

“Be strong. Overflow with emotional and intellectual energy, and you will spread your intelligence, your love, your energy of action broadcast among others! This is what all moral teaching comes to.”
― Peter Kropotkin, Anarchist Morality

“Well-being for all is not a dream.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

“in the long run the practice of solidarity proves much more advantageous to the species than the development of individuals endowed with predatory inclinations.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

“In our civilized societies we are rich. Why then are the many poor? Why this painful drudgery for the masses? Why, even to the best paid workman, this uncertainty for the morrow, in the midst of all the wealth inherited from the past, and in spite of the powerful means of production, which could ensure comfort to all, in return for a few hours of daily toil?”
― Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich, kniaz, The Conquest of Bread

“Struggle so that all may live this rich, overflowing life. And be sure that in this struggle you will find a joy greater than anything else can give.”
― Peter Kropotkin, Anarchist Morality

“The working people cannot purchase with their wages the wealth which they have produced,”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

“When one has talent, everything contributes to its development.”
― Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist

“Why has woman's work never been of any account? Why in every family are the mother and three or four servants obliged to spend so much time at what pertains to cooking? Because those who want to emancipate mankind have not included woman in their dream of emancipation, and consider it beneath their superior masculine dignity to think "of those kitchen arrangements," which they have put on the shoulders of that drudge—woman.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

“But capital goes wherever there are men, poor enough to be exploited.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

“Somebody has said that dust is matter in the wrong place. The same definition applies to nine-tenths of those called lazy. They are people gone astray in a direction that does not answer to their temperament nor to their capacities. In reading the biography of great men, we are struck with the number of "idlers" among them. They were lazy so long as they had not found the right path; afterwards they became laborious to excess. Darwin, Stephenson, and many others belonged to this category of idlers.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

“Every machine has had the same history – a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.
Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle – all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.
By what right then can anyone whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say – This is mine, not yours?”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

“It often happens that men pull in a certain political, social, or familiar harness simply because they never have time to ask themselves whether the position they stand in and the work they accomplish are right; whether their occupations really suit their inner desires and capacities, and give them the satisfaction which everyone has the right to expect from his work. Active men are especially liable to find themselves in such a position. Every day brings with it a fresh batch of work, and a man throws himself into his bed late at night without having completed what he had expected to do; then in the morning he hurries to the unfinished task of the previous day. Life goes, and there is no time left to think, no time to consider the direction that one's life is taking. So it was with me.”
― Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist

“All is for all! If the man and the woman bear their fair share of work, they have a right to their fair share of all that is produced by all, and that share is enough to secure them well-being. No more of such vague formulas as "The right to work," or "To each the whole result of his labour." What we proclaim is The Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All!”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

“...do not the bewitching power of all studies lie in that they continually open up to us new, unsuspected horizons, not yet understood, which entice us to proceed further and further in the penetration of what appears at first sight only in vague outline?”
― Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist

“In fact, we know full well today that it is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal

“Throughout the history of our civilisation, two traditions, two opposed tendencies, have been in conflict: the Roman tradition and the popular tradition, the imperial tradition and the federalist tradition, the authoritarian tradition and the libertarian tradition.”
― Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

“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.”
― Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist

“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. ”
― Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist

“Poverty, we have said elsewhere, was the primary cause of wealth. It was poverty that created the first capitalist; because, before accumulating "surplus value," of which we hear so much, men had to be sufficiently destitute to consent to sell their labour, so as not to die of hunger. It was poverty that made capitalists.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

“The prison population consists of heterogeneous elements; but, taking only those who are usually described as 'the criminals' proper, and of whom we have heard so much lately from Lombroso and his followers, what struck me most as regards them was that the prisons, which are considered as preventive of anti-social deeds, are exactly the institutions for breeding them. Every one knows that absence of education, dislike of regular work, physical incapability of sustained effort, misdirected love of adventure, gambling propensities, absence of energy, an untrained will, and carelessness about the happiness of others are the causes which bring this class of people before the courts. Now I was deeply impressed during my imprisonment by the fact that it is exactly these defects of human nature--each one of them--which the prison breeds in its inmates; and it is bound to breed them because it is a prison, and will breed them so long as it exists. ”
― Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist