Quote

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

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
Great
Weight
Every
Mass
Always
Move
Leaden
Effort
Bearers
Idea
Banner
Moving
Liberating
Doe
Period
Ideas
Periods

More quotes by Emma Goldman

Image
Political violence is organized violence on the top which creates individual violence at the bottom.
Emma Goldman
Image
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
Image
Do not all theists insist that there can be no morality, no justice, honesty or fidelity without the belief in a Divine Power? Based upon fear and hope, such morality has always been a vile product, imbued partiy with self-righteousness, partly with hypocrisy.
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
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
No, it is not because woman is lacking in responsibility, but because she has too much of the latter that she demands to know how to prevent conception.
Emma Goldman
Image
I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.
Emma Goldman
Image
... 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.
Emma Goldman
Image
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
Image
John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?
Emma Goldman
Image
Pettiness separates breadth unites. Let us be broad and big.
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
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.
Emma Goldman
Image
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
Image
Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.
Emma Goldman
Image
Lack of fairness to an opponent is essentially a sign of weakness.
Emma Goldman
Image
Man must get back to himself before he can learn his relation to his fellows. Prometheus chained to the Rock of Ages is doomed to remain the prey of the vultures of darkness. Unbind Prometheus, and you dispel the night and its horrors.
Emma Goldman
Image
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.
Emma Goldman
Image
The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief... So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies.
Emma Goldman
Image
If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
Emma Goldman