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There's never been a good government.

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
Libertarian
Liberty
Government
Good
Never
Libertarianism

More quotes by Emma Goldman

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Politicians promise you heaven before election and give you hell after
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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.
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Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of women is responsible for prostitution.
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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.
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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.
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Even were the workers able to have their own representatives, for which our good Socialist politicians are clamoring, what chances are there for their honesty and good faith?
Emma Goldman
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No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
Emma Goldman
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It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice, which drives the political offender to act.
Emma Goldman
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Crime is naught but misdirected energy.
Emma Goldman
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The God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.
Emma Goldman
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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
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As to a thorough eradication of prostitution, nothing can accomplish that save a complete transvaluation of all accepted values--especially the moral ones--coupled with the abolition of industrial slavery.
Emma Goldman
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I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself to live for herself to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.
Emma Goldman
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If elections really changed anything, they would be outlawed.
Emma Goldman
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The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.
Emma Goldman
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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
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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.
Emma Goldman
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If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right!
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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You have opened up the prison gates of my womanhood. And all the passion that was unsatisfied in for me so many years, leaped into a wild reckless storm boundless as the sea.
Emma Goldman