Alexander Berkman Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood.

Alexander Berkman
War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder.

Alexander Berkman
The cure for evil and disorder is more liberty, not suppression.

Alexander Berkman
Terrorism is tempting with its tremendous possibilities. It offers a mechanical solution, as it were, in hopeless situations. … the principles of terrorism unavoidably rebound to the fatal injury of liberty and revolution. Absolute power corrupts and defeats its partisans no less than its opponents. A people that knows not liberty becomes accustomed to dictatorship: fighting despotism and counter-revolution, terrorism itself becomes their efficient school. Once on the road of terrorism, the State necessarily becomes estranged from the people.

Alexander Berkman
"Man's inhumanity to man" is not the last word. The truth lies deeper. It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep.

Alexander Berkman
It is the system, rather than individuals, that is the source of pollution and degradation. My prison-house environment is but another manifestation of the Midas-hand, whose cursed touch turns everything to the brutal service of Mammon.

Alexander Berkman
Are you not compelled to work for an employer? Your need compels you just as the highwayman's gun. You must live … You can't work for yourself … The factories, machinery, and tools belong to the employing class, so you must hire yourself out to that class in order to work and live. Whatever you work at, whoever your employer may be, it always comes to the same: you must workfor him. You can't help yourself. You are compelled.

Alexander Berkman
In short, Anarchism means a condition or society where all men and women are free, and where all enjoy equally the benefits of an ordered and sensible life.

Alexander Berkman
Existence has become an unreasoning, wild dance around the golden calf, a mad worship of God Mammon. In that dance and in that worship man has sacrificed all his finer qualities of the heart and soul — kindness and justice, honor and manhood, compassion and sympathy with his fellowman.

Alexander Berkman
Certainly the worker has nothing to lose by a change from government and capitalism to a condition of no government, of anarchy.

Alexander Berkman