Emma Goldman Quotes

217 Sourced Quotes

The most violent element in society is ignorance...

Emma Goldman
The contention that a standing army and navy is the best security of peace is about as logical as the claim that the most peaceful citizen is he who goes about heavily armed.

Emma Goldman
'What I believe' is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect.

Emma Goldman
All wars are wars among thieves who are too cowardly to fight and who therefore induce the young manhood of the whole world to do the fighting for them.

Emma Goldman
The worker who knows the cause of his misery, who understands the make-up of our iniquitous social and industrial system can do more for himself and his kind than Christ and the followers of Christ have ever done for humanity; certainly more than meek patience, ignorance, and submission have done.

Emma Goldman
One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; besides, the extreme thing is generally the true thing.

Emma Goldman
In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.

Emma Goldman
Religion is a superstition that originated in man s mental inability to solve natural phenomena. The Church is an organized institution that has always been stumbling to block progress.

Emma Goldman
How long would authority... exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen.

Emma Goldman
Those who will not worship at the shrine of money, need not hope for recognition. On the other hand, they will also not have to think other people's thoughts or wear other people's political clothes. They will not have to proclaim as true that which is false, nor praise that as humanitarian which is brutal.

Emma Goldman
The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. The wholesale mechanisation of modern life has increased uniformity a thousandfold. It is everywhere present, in habits, tastes, dress, thoughts and ideas. Its most concentrated dullness is "public opinion." Few have the courage to stand out against it. He who refuses to submit is at once labelled "queer," "different," and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life.

Emma Goldman
Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in.

Emma Goldman
No, it is not because woman is lacking in responsibility, but because she has too much of the latter that she demands to know how to prevent conception.

Emma Goldman
Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soulless army of human prey.

Emma Goldman
It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom.

Emma Goldman
Religion and morality are a much better whip to keep people in submission than even the club and the gun.

Emma Goldman
Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony.

Emma Goldman
To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.

Emma Goldman
The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief... So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies.

Emma Goldman
The State has no more existence than gods and devils have. They are equally the reflex and creation of man, for man, the individual, is the only reality. The State is but the shadow of man, the shadow of his opaqueness, of his ignorance and fear.

Emma Goldman
No real social change has ever come about without a revolution.

Emma Goldman
John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

Emma Goldman
Thinking men and women the world over are beginning to realize that patriotism is too narrow and limited a conception to meet the necessities of our time.

Emma Goldman
Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.

Emma Goldman
The conception of gods originated in fear and curiosity. Primitive man, unable to understand the phenomena of nature, and harassed by them, saw in every terrifying manifestation some sinister force expressly directed against him; and as ignorance and fear are the parents of all superstition, the troubled fancy of primitive man wove the God idea.

Emma Goldman
I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years been working to undo the botched job your god has made.

Emma Goldman
The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.

Emma Goldman
Militarism consumes the strongest and most productive elements of each nation. Militarism swallows the largest part of the national revenue.

Emma Goldman
The history of human growth is at the same time the history of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn, and the brighter dawn has always been considered illegal, outside of the law.

Emma Goldman
'Readiness,' far far from assuring peace, has at all times and in all countries been instrumental in precipitating armed conflicts.

Emma Goldman