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The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.

Emma Goldman

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Emma Goldman
Age: 70 †
Born: 1869
Born: June 27
Died: 1940
Died: May 14
Anarchist
Autobiographer
Feminist
Journalist
Lecturer
Nurse
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Political Activist
Political Philosopher
Publisher
Kovno
State
Purpose
Freedom
Political
Altar
States
Altars
Human
Maintained
Humans
Sacrifice
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Religious

More quotes by Emma Goldman

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Yes, authority, coercion, and dependence rest on the mass, but never freedom or the free unfoldment of the individual, never the birth of a free society. The Socialist demagogues know that as well as I, but they maintain the myth of the virtues of the majority, because their very scheme of life means the perpetuation of power.
Emma Goldman
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Those who sit in a glass house do wrong to throw stones about them besides, the American glass house is rather thin, it will break easily, and the interior is anything but a gainly sight.
Emma Goldman
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... woman does not see what people of intellect perceived fifty years ago: that suffrage is an evil, that it has only helped to enslave people, that it has but closed their eyes that they may not see how craftily they were made to submit.
Emma Goldman
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The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that from early infancy the mind of the child is provided with blood-curdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc.
Emma Goldman
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To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.
Emma Goldman
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Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against society, that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship.
Emma Goldman
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Pettiness separates breadth unites. Let us be broad and big.
Emma Goldman
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Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion and liberation of the human body from the coercion of property liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. It stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals.
Emma Goldman
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The average mind is easily content with inherited and acquired things, or with the dicta of parents and teachers, because it is much easier to imitate than to create.
Emma Goldman
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Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.
Emma Goldman
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Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.
Emma Goldman
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Mother Liberty caresses with generous affections...[those] who, armed with the weapons of high-minded honesty,...have grasped that the freedom of each is rooted in the freedom of all.
Emma Goldman
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A politician, he knows that the majority cares little for ideals or integrity. What it craves is display.
Emma Goldman
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Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be.
Emma Goldman
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The people are urged to be patriotic ... by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegience to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister.
Emma Goldman
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Christ and his teachings are the embodiment of submission, of inertia, of the denial of life hence responsible for the things done in their name.
Emma Goldman
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Art is a part of the rebellion against the realities of its unfulfilled desire.
Emma Goldman
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Our institutions and conditions rest upon deep-seated ideas. To change those conditions and at the same time leave the underlying ideas and values intact means only a superficial transformation, one that cannot be permanent or bring real betterment. It is a change of form only, not of substance, as so tragically proven by Russia.
Emma Goldman
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statutory regulations, legislative enactments, constitutional provisions, are invasive. They never yet induced man to do anything he could and would not do by virtue of his intellect or temperament, nor prevented anything that man was impelled to do by the same dictates.
Emma Goldman
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Lack of fairness to an opponent is essentially a sign of weakness.
Emma Goldman