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Leo Tolstoy ... defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.

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
Wholesale
Defines
Murderer
Patriotism
Justify
Principle
Training
Tolstoy
Principles
Murderers

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True, the movement for woman's rights has broken many old fetters, but it has also forged new ones.
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When primitive man heard thunder or saw the lightning, he could not account for either, and therefore concluded that back of them must be a force greater than himself. Similarly he saw a supernatural force in the rain, and in the various other changes in nature.
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If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.
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Success achieved by the most contemptible means cannot but destroy the soul. ... It helps to cover up the inner corruption and gradually dulls one's scruples, so that those who begin with some high ambition cannot, even if they would, create anything out of themselves.
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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.
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Under miserable conditions of life, any vision of the possibility of better things makes the present misery more intolerable, and spurs those who suffer to the most energetic struggles to improve their lot, and if these struggles only immediately result in sharper misery, the outcome is sheer desperation.
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Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! 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.
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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.
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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.
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Peter Kropotkin...was recognized by friend and foe as one of the greatest minds...of the nineteenth century...The lucidity and brilliance of his mind combined with his warm-heartednes s into the harmonious whole of a fascinating and gracious personality.
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After all, that is what laws are for, to be made and unmade.
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Anarchism, the great leaven of thought, is today permeating every phase of human endeavor.... It is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. It is the theory of social harmony. It is the great, surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world, and that will usher in the Dawn.
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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.
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When we have undermined the patriotic lie, we shall have cleared the path for the great structure where all shall be united into a universal brotherhood — a truly free society.
Emma Goldman
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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.
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Crime is naught but misdirected energy.
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I don't care if a man's theory for tomorrow is correct, I care if his spirit of today is correct.
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Political violence is organized violence on the top which creates individual violence at the bottom.
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More pernicious than the power of a dictator is that of a class the most terrible - the tyranny of a majority.
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Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society.
Emma Goldman