Jonathan Leventhal > Jonathan's Quotes

“People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.”
― Emma Goldman

“I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.”
― Emma Goldman

“The most violent element in society is ignorance. ”
― Emma Goldman

“Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

“Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion and liberation of the human body from the coercion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. It stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals…”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

“The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

“No real social change has ever been
brought about without a revolution -
Revolution is but thought carried into action.
Every effort for progress, for enlightenment,
for science, for religious, political, and
economic liberty, emanates from the minority,
and not from the mass.”
― Emma Goldman

“If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.”
― Emma Goldman

“If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.”
― Murray Bookchin

“There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.”
― Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism

“If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.”
― Murray Bookchin

“We are part of nature, a product of a long evolutionary journey. To some degree, we carry the ancient oceans in our blood. … Our brains and nervous systems did not suddenly spring into existence without long antecedents in natural history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity - our extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels - can be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate.”
― Murray Bookchin, Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman

“Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity that will use its collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations, scientific knowledge, and innate creativity for its own benefit and for that of the natural world, all ecological problems will have their roots in social problems.”
― Murray Bookchin

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy