19th-century Activist Quotes

Annie Besant

Louis Auguste Blanqui

Margaret Fuller

Susan B. Anthony

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Errico Malatesta

Roger Casement

Kansas had better stop raising corn and begin raising hell.

Mary Elizabeth Lease

The working class owes all honor and respect to the first men who planted the standard of labor solidarity on the hostile frontier of unorganized industry.

It is not the religious beliefs, whether right or wrong, which are opposed to culture and material progress, but that belief which prohibits learning of sciences, earning one's livelihood and the ways of culture. I do not believe that there is any religion in the world which opposes these things. I would rather say that it is non-believing which inevitably leads to disorder and distortion of culture as in the case of the Nihilists.

Jamal-al-Din Afghani

We shall never become an immense power in the world until we concentrate all our money and editorial forces upon one great national daily newspaper, so we can sauce back our opponents every day in the year; once a month or once a week is not enough.

Susan B. Anthony

While a man is stringing a harp, he tries the strings, not for music, but for construction. When it is finished it shall be played for melodies. God is fashioning the human heart for future joy. He only sounds a string here and there to see how far His work has progressed.

Henry Ward Beecher

The man of meditation is the man who wastes no time, scatters no energy, misses no opportunity.

To say that we could not work without capital is as true as to say that we could not mow without a scythe. To say that we could not work without a capitalist is as false as to say that we could not mow a meadow unless all the scythes belonged to one man. Nay, it is as false as to say that we could not mow unless all the scythes belonged to one man and he took a third of the harvest as payment for the loan of them.

Robert Blatchford

Education and justice are democracy's only life insurance....

Nannie Helen Burroughs

Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war.

The starlight of heaven above us shall quiver
As our souls flow in one down eternity's river.

Thomas Osborne Davis

The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage.

Margaret Fuller

Always try to associate with people from whom you can learn something. All the knowledge that you want is in the world, and all you have to do is go and seek it.

The capitalist has no heart, but harpoon him in the pocketbook and you will draw blood.

Robert Ingersoll was humorist, iconoclast and lover of humanity.
It is said that the difference between man and the lower animals is that man has the ability to laugh.
When you laugh you relax, and when you relax you give freedom to muscles, nerves and brain-cells. Man seldom has use of his reason when his brain is tense. The sense of humor makes a condition where reason can act.
Ingersoll knew that he must make his appeal to man's brain.

Alice Moore Hubbard

When we arrived in London, my sadness at leaving Paris was turned into despair. After my long stay in the French capital, huge, ponderous, massive London seemed to me as ugly a thing as man could contrive to make.

James Weldon Johnson

The employment of children is doing more to fill prisons, insane asylums, almshouses, reformatories, slums, and gin shops than all the efforts of reformers are doing to improve society.

Mary Harris Jones

Pathans! Your house has fallen into ruin. Arise and rebuild it and remember to what race you belong.

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "No" to war. For one does not create human society on mounds of corpses.

Facts and not merely opinions are what we want. Emotionalism is not a substitute for the truth.

The only limit to the oppression of government is the power with which the people show themselves capable of opposing it.

Errico Malatesta

The survival of democracy depends on the renunciation of violence and the development of nonviolent means to combat evil and advance the good.

The property of the estate owners (pomeshchiks) doesn't belong to any particular detachment, but to the people as a whole. Let the people take what they want.

Maria Nikiforova

Freedom is the very essence of life, the impelling force in all intellectual and social development, the creator of every new outlook for the future of mankind. The liberation of man from economic exploitation and from intellectual and political oppression, which finds its finest expression in the world-philosophy of Anarchism, is the first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity.

Either Christ is a liar or war is never necessary, and very properly assuming that Christ told the truth, it follows that the State is without [in the words of Father Macksey] 'judicial authority to determine when war is necessary,' because it is never necessary.

I shall die... as I have lived, rationalist, socialist, pacifist, and humanitarian.

Henry Stephens Salt