James

“Nothing yet has been accomplished Meanwhile the people suffer. The factories are idle, the workshops closed; industry is at a standstill. The worker does not even earn the meagre wage which was his before. Food goes up in price. With that heroic devotion which has always characterized them, and which in great crises reaches the sublime, the people wait patiently.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread: The Founding Book of Anarchism

“The mitigated individualism of the collectivist system certainly could not maintain itself alongside a partial communism”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread: The Founding Book of Anarchism

“We accustom ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to the practice of a double-faced morality. And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselves with sophistry. Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the civilized man.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread: The Founding Book of Anarchism

“So the poor wretches swarm over the baron’s lands, making roads, draining marshes, building villages. In nine years he begins to tax them. Five years later he increases the rent. Then he doubles it. The peasant accepts these new conditions because he cannot find better ones elsewhere; and little by little, with the aid of laws made by the barons, the poverty of the peasant becomes the source of the landlord’s wealth. And it is not only the lord of the manor who preys upon him. A whole host of usurers swoop down upon the villages, multiplying as the wretchedness of the peasants increases. That is how things went in the Middle Ages. And to-day is it not still the same thing?”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread: The Founding Book of Anarchism