Lucy Parsons > Quotes

“Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.”
― Lucy Parsons, Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality & Solidarity - Writings & Speeches, 1878-1937

“Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.”
― Lucy Parsons

“Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, "Freedom." Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully." — Lucy Parsons”
― Lucy Parsons, Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality & Solidarity - Writings & Speeches, 1878-1937

“Oh, working man! Oh, starved, outraged, and robbed laborer, how long will you lend attentive ear to the authors of your misery?”
― Lucy Parsons

“There is no power on earth so great as the power of intellect. It moves the world and it moves the earth.”
― Lucy Parsons

“It is the moving inspiration of our age, the only question worth struggling for: the question of how to lift humanity from poverty and despair.”
― Lucy Parsons

“we have made work disagreeable because we have allowed conditions to obtain which force us to continue to work after we are tired, or at something for which we have no taste, take no interest in and have no adaptability for. For this reason we lose pleasure in work and it becomes irksome to us;”
― Lucy Parsons

“Concentrated power can be always wielded in the interest of the few and at the expense of the many. Government in its last analysis is this power reduced to a science. Governments never lead; they follow progress. When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then.”
― Lucy Parsons

“We have laws, jails, courts, armies, guns and armories enough to make saints of us all, if they were the true preventives of crime; but we know they do not prevent crime; that wickedness and depravity exist in spite of them, nay, increase as the struggle between classes grows fiercer, wealth greater and more powerful and poverty more gaunt and desperate.”
― Lucy Parsons

“The selfish scheme called “property rights” has superseded human rights and created four times more useless work than is required to produce and distribute all the comforts and luxuries of life.”
― Lucy Parsons

“a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society”
― Lucy Parsons

“Let the masses understand that these robbers hold this property (which is so much unpaid labor) under the plea of the laws which they themselves [the robbers] have made, and by the sanction of the very men they have locked out to starve.”
― Lucy Parsons

“The overseer’s whip is now fully supplanted by the lash of hunger! And the auction block by the chain-gang and convict cell”
― Lucy Parsons

“If the great body of the people have clamored for our comrades’ blood, it was because they believed what the lying monopolistic press has said.”
― Lucy Parsons

“Every person who is rendering no good to humanity is useless, no matter how hard they work. Head work and hand work are equally hard and equally useful if rightly applied. All people, rich and poor, are working at something; perhaps one at useful labor, the other at useless labor. Nevertheless they are each and all using their energies at some occupation.”
― Lucy Parsons

“The sooner men learn to make companions and equals of their wives and not subordinates, the sooner the marriage relation will be one of harmony.”
― Lucy Parsons

“are you not slaves to the money power as much as were the black slaves to the Southern slaveholders? Then we ask you again: What are you going to do about it? You had the ballot then. Could you have voted away black slavery? You know you could not because the slaveholders would not hear of such a thing for the same reason you can’t vote yourselves out of wage-slavery.”
― Lucy Parsons

“when the proletariat, failing to see the justice of this bourgeois economy, begins to murmur, the policeman’s club is called into active service.”
― Lucy Parsons

“I hope even now to live to see the day when the first dawn of the new era of labor will have arisen, when capitalism will be a thing of the past, and the new industrial republic, the commonwealth of labor, shall be in operation.”
― Lucy Parsons

“a “strike,” which means a resistance on the part of the oppressed toward the oppressor—a protest, as it were”
― Lucy Parsons

“Now, what do we mean when we say revolutionary Socialist? We mean that the land shall belong to the landless, the tools to the toiler, and the products to the producers”
― Lucy Parsons

“When will the people see the real cause of all their woe—the private ownership of the means of life?
When will the masses learn that property is theirs and theirs only who has produced it—earned it?”
― Lucy Parsons

“There was a movement at one time, not so many years ago either, which was international in its scope, which had for its object the setting aside the first of May for a general, international holiday, looking ultimately to the inauguration of a short-hour workday, but this grand idea has been side-tracked in later years by a lot of political buncombe and claptrap, thus persuading the working classes into the notion that they can gain their freedom by electing a lot of fellows to office.

(1906)”
― Lucy Parsons

“Give them to understand that you will not stand patiently by and see your hard earnings squandered by a luxuriating class of idlers.”
― Lucy Parsons

“it is labor, and labor only, which makes civilization possible. ’Tis labor that toils, and spins, and weaves, and builds, that another, not it, may enjoy. ’Tis the laborers who dive into the unknown caverns of the sea and compel her to yield up her hidden treasures, which they know not even the value thereof.”
― Lucy Parsons

“It was during the great railroad strike of 1877 that i became interested in what is known as the 'Labor question”
― Lucy Parsons

“A reduction of the hours of labor to the point where all can have employment is worth a General Strike, because upon this point all efforts can be focused, and if carried, its beneficial effects would be felt immediately by the whole working class, men, women and children.”
― Lucy Parsons

“Ma conception de la grève du futur ne consiste pas à faire la grève et se laisser mourir de faim, mais de faire la grève et s'approprier la production”
― Lucy Parsons

“It is becoming more and more apparent that in every way we are "governed best where we are governed least.”
― Lucy Parsons

“How many of the wage class, as a class, are there who can avoid obeying the commands of the master (employing) class, as a class? Not many, are there?
Then are you not slaves to the money power as much as were the black slaves to the Southern slaveholders? Then we ask you again: What are you going to do about it? You had the ballot then. Could you have voted away black slavery? You know you could not because the slaveholders would not hear of such a thing for the same reason you can’t vote yourselves out of wage-slavery.”
― Lucy Parsons