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People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.

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
Take
Much
People
Independence
Intelligence
Independent
Courage
Liberty

More quotes by 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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So-called Individualism is the social and economic laissez-faire: the exploitation of the masses by the classes by means of legal trickery, spiritual debasement and systematic indoctrination of the servile spirit, which process is known as 'education'.
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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Always, at every period, the few were the banner bearers of a great idea, of liberating effort. Not so the mass, the leaden weight of which does not let it move.
Emma Goldman
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Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested - for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day.
Emma Goldman
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I believe - indeed, I know - that whatever is fine and beautiful in the human expresses and asserts itself in spite of government, and not because of it.
Emma Goldman
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Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.
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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The government will ... go on in the highly democratic method of conscripting American manhood for European slaughter.
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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In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, however, womans premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, until death doth part.
Emma Goldman
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The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does not let him expand or grow.
Emma Goldman
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Yes, love is free it can dwell in no other atmosphere.
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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The higher mental development of woman, the less possible it is for her to meet a congenial male who will see in her, not only sex, but also the human being, the friend, the comrade and strong individuality, who cannot and ought not lose a single trait of her character.
Emma Goldman
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In modern capitalism economic exploitation rather than political oppression is the real enemy of the people.
Emma Goldman
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The State, every government whatever its form, character or color - be it absolute or constitutional, monarchy or republic, Fascist, Nazi or bolshevik - is by its very nature conservative, static, intolerant of change and opposed to it.
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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To-day is the parent of to-morrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future.
Emma Goldman
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... resistance to tyranny is man's highest ideal.
Emma Goldman