Quote

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.

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
Must
Saws
Thunder
Men
Therefore
Lightning
Either
Primitive
Heard
Account
Greater
Accounts
Force
Various
Concluded
Nature
Rain
Similarly
Back
Changes
Supernatural

More quotes by 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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Every society has the criminals it deserves.
Emma Goldman
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all government, whatever its forms or pretenses, is a dead weight that paralyzes the free spirit and activities of the masses.
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 philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.
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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The State is a term for the legislative and administrative machinery whereby certain business of the people is transacted, and badly so.
Emma Goldman
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In the face of this approaching disaster, it behooves men and women not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them.
Emma Goldman
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Love needs no protection it is its own protection.
Emma Goldman
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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.
Emma Goldman
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Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world, the mottos of which are: 'To take is more blessed than to give' 'buy cheap and sell dear' 'one soiled hand washes the other.
Emma Goldman
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... if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but itcan not do without that life.
Emma Goldman
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Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.
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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Patriotism is a menace to liberty.
Emma Goldman
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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
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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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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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Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society.
Emma Goldman
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In modern capitalism economic exploitation rather than political oppression is the real enemy of the people.
Emma Goldman