R. Reddebrek > R.'s Quotes

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
― Albert Einstein

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
― Albert Einstein

“Ultimately Zamenhof’s language [Esperanto] was and is more than a proposed solution to the language problem: it is an attempt to confront the spirit of inequality, of intolerance, of hatred that is tearing apart our beautiful world.”
― Humphrey Tonkin

“− Se nur ĝi ne devis okazi en mia epoko, − diris Frodo.
− Tiel pensas ankaŭ mi, − diris Gandalfo, − kaj tiel pensas ĉiuj, kiuj travivas tiajn epokojn. Sed tion ne ili decidas. Ni rajtas decidi nur tion, kion fari dum la tempo allasita al ni.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Mia intereso pri lingvoj sendube fontas el mia junaĝa malkovro de esperanto,”
― Claude Piron, La bona lingvo

“Baf!" diris Scrooge. "Sensencaĵo!”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”
― Max Stirner

“The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

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

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

“The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.”
― C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

“Each cooperative in Mondragon has its own workplace structure, though there are similarities and tendencies that most of them share. The firm called Irizar, which manufactures products for trans-portation, from luxury coaches to city buses, exemplifies these tendencies. To encourage innovation and the diffusion of knowledge, there are no bosses or departments in Irizar. Rather, it has a flat organizational structure based on work teams with a high degree of autonomy. (One study remarks that they “set their own targets, establish their own work schedules, [and] organize the work process as they see fit.”) The teams also work with each other, so that knowledge is transmitted efficiently. Participation occurs also in the general assembly, which meets three times a year rather than the single annual meeting common in other Mondragon firms. Its subsidiaries in other countries have at least two general assemblies a year, where they approve the company’s strategic plan, investments, etc. These participatory structures have enabled Irizar to surpass its competitors in profitability and market share.69”
― Chris Wright, Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States

“Trade-unionism, the economic arena of the modern gladiator, owes its existence to direct action. It is but recently that law and government have attempted to crush the trade-union movement, and condemned the exponents of man's right to organize to prison as conspirators. Had they sought to assert their cause through begging, pleading, and compromise, trade-unionism would today be a negligible quantity. In France, in Spain, in Italy, in Russia, nay even in England (witness the growing rebellion of English labor unions) direct, revolutionary, economic action has become so strong a force in the battle for industrial liberty as to make the world realize the tremendous importance of labor's power. The General Strike, the supreme expression of the economic consciousness of the workers, was ridiculed in America but a short time ago. Today every great strike, in order to win, must realize the importance of the solidaric general protest.”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and other essays

“Few countries have produced such arrogance and snobbishness as America.”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and other essays

“Hate does not produce love, and by hate one cannot remake the world.”
― Errico Malatesta

“We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves.”
― Errico Malatesta

“Capitalism is the same everywhere. In order to survive and prosper it needs a permanent situation of partial scarcity: it needs it to maintain its prices and to create hungry masses to work under any conditions.”
― Errico Malatesta, At the Café: Conversations on Anarchism

“Anarchists present a new method; the free initiative of all and free agreement; then, after the revolutionary abolition of private property, every one will have equal power to dispose of social wealth.”
― Errico Malatesta, Anarchy

“The most prominent characteristic of capitalism is the wage system, which in brief amounts to this: — A man, or a group of men, possessing the necessary capital, starts some industrial enterprise; he undertakes to supply the factory or workshops with raw material, to organize production, to pay the employés a fixed wage, and lastly, to pocket the surplus value or profits, under pretext of recouping himself for managing the concern, for running the risks it may involve, and for the fluctuations of price in the market value of the wares.”
― Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread: The Founding Book of Anarchism

“If a society, a city, or a territory, were to guarantee the necessaries of life to its inhabitants (and we shall see how the conception of the necessaries of life can be so extended as to include luxuries), it would be compelled to take possession of what is absolutely needed for production; that is to say — land, machinery, factories, means of transport, etc. Capital in the hands of private owners would be expropriated and returned to the community. The great harm done by bourgeois society, as we have already mentioned, is not only that capitalists seize a large share of the profits of each industrial and commercial enterprise, thus enabling them to live without working, but that all production has taken a wrong direction, as it is not carried on with a view to securing well-being to all. For this reason we condemn it. Moreover, it is impossible to carry on mercantile production in everybody’s interest. To wish it would be to expect the capitalist to go beyond his province and to fulfill duties that he cannot fulfill without ceasing to be what he is — a private manufacturer seeking his own enrichment. Capitalist organization, based on the personal interest of each individual trader, has given all that could be expected of it to society — it has increased the productive force of work. The capitalist, profiting by the revolution effected in industry by steam, by the sudden development of chemistry and machinery, and by other inventions of our century, has endeavoured in his own interest to increase the yield of work, and in a great measure he has succeeded. But to attribute other duties to him would be unreasonable. For example, to expect that he should use this superior yield of work in the interest of society as a whole, would be to ask philanthropy and charity of him, and a capitalist enterprise cannot be based on charity.”
― Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread: The Founding Book of Anarchism

“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 Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order and in the assertion that, without Authority there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“These days even mere attempts to improve capitalism are often called ‘Socialism,’ while in reality they are only reforms.”
― Alexander Berkman, The ABC of Anarchism

“Inhumanity is the keynote of stupidity in power.”
― Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist

“Any one who tells you that Anarchists don’t believe in organization is talking nonsense. Organization is everything, and everything is organization.”
― Alexander Berkman

“The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. it opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. in moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism