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What I prized most was freedom, freedom to do my work, to give myself spontaneously and not out of duty or by command. I could not submit to such demands rather would I choose the path of a homeless wanderer yes, even go without love.

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
Without
Command
Giving
Demand
Wanderer
Even
Choose
Prized
Work
Duty
Wanderers
Would
Path
Spontaneously
Love
Rather
Homeless
Freedom
Submit
Give
Demands

More quotes by Emma Goldman

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The triumph of the philosophy of Atheism is to free man from the nightmare of gods it means the dissolution of the phantoms of the beyond.
Emma Goldman
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... nothing satisfies the craving of most women so much as scandal.
Emma Goldman
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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.
Emma Goldman
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After all, that is what laws are for, to be made and unmade.
Emma Goldman
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What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!
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 majority cannot reason it has no judgement. It has always placed its destiny in the hands of others it has followed its leaders even into destruction. The mass has always opposed, condemned, and hounded the innovator, the pioneer of a new truth.
Emma Goldman
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Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature.
Emma Goldman
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If elections really changed anything, they would be outlawed.
Emma Goldman
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Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.
Emma Goldman
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Religion! How it dominates man's mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion.But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began.
Emma Goldman
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Love needs no protection it is its own protection.
Emma Goldman
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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.
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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Crime is naught but misdirected energy.
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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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 function of militarism is to kill. It cannot live except through murder.
Emma Goldman
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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.
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