Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Groups
Struggle
Hypnotized
State
Subdued
Society
Continuous
Individual
Individuals
States
Worship
Even
Majority
Civilization

More quotes by Emma Goldman

Image
After all, that is what laws are for, to be made and unmade.
Emma Goldman
Image
How long would authority ... exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen.
Emma Goldman
Image
It is a tragedy, I feel, that people of a different sexual type are caught in a world which shows so little understanding for homosexuals and is so crassly indifferent to the various gradations and variations of gender and their great significance in life.
Emma Goldman
Image
Pettiness separates breadth unites. Let us be broad and big.
Emma Goldman
Image
[Woman's] life-long economic parasitism has utterly blurred her conception of the meaning of equality.
Emma Goldman
Image
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
Image
It is significant that whenever the public mind is to be diverted from great social wrong, a crusade is inaugurated against indecency.
Emma Goldman
Image
We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens.
Emma Goldman
Image
Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most. His very uniqueness, separateness and differentiation make him an alien, not only in his native place, but even in his own home. Often more so than the foreign born who generally falls in with the established.
Emma Goldman
Image
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
Image
... nothing satisfies the craving of most women so much as scandal.
Emma Goldman
Image
There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can't be.
Emma Goldman
Image
A politician, he knows that the majority cares little for ideals or integrity. What it craves is display.
Emma Goldman
Image
Let us not overlook vital things, because of the bulk of trifles confronting us.
Emma Goldman
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.
Emma Goldman
Image
Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.
Emma Goldman
Image
Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination.
Emma Goldman
Image
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