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I am puzzled by people today who, after moralizing about the need for cooperation and goodwill and love-thy-neighbor-as-thyself, suddenly invoke the most primitive, barbarous motivations for any kind of progress.

Murray Bookchin

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Murray Bookchin
Age: 85 †
Born: 1921
Born: January 14
Died: 2006
Died: July 30
Author
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Historian
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Politician
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
The Bronx
New York City
Need
Thyself
Needs
Cooperation
Kind
Primitive
Moralizing
Love
Neighbor
Motivations
People
Suddenly
Barbarous
Motivation
Puzzled
Progress
Invoke
Today
Goodwill

More quotes by Murray Bookchin

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There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.
Murray Bookchin
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Until we become the architects of a society that is truly free and ecological, it will always seem that when the human brain is not adaptive, it is more often destructive than creative.
Murray Bookchin
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I believe that anarchists should agree to disagree but not to fight with each other.
Murray Bookchin
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I'm much more interested in developing human character in society. And I'm much more interested in the social conditions that foster commitment to ideals, a sense of solidarity, purposefulness, steadfastness, responsibility.
Murray Bookchin
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My anarchism is frankly anarcho-communalism, and it's eco-anarchism as well. And it's not oriented toward the proletariat.
Murray Bookchin
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I will never surrender the rights of the individual - the complete rights of the individual - to any ism whatever.
Murray Bookchin
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People are never free of trying to be content.
Murray Bookchin
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Deny my individuality and I become an animal, mute, a mere creature of all the forces that act upon me.
Murray Bookchin
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Anarchists should get together who agree, and develop their gifts at a critical point, in a critical place, and form genuine affinity groups in areas where they can have certain results, notable results - not move into areas of great resistance where they're almost certain to be crushed, defeated, demoralized.
Murray Bookchin
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I don't want to think any longer simply in terms of the Spanish Revolution or the Russian Revolution. It doesn't make any sense to talk [Peter] Makhno to an American.
Murray Bookchin
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I believe that any attempt on the part of a libertarian communist society to abridge the rights of a community - for example, to operate on the basis of a market economy of the kind that you describe - would be unforgivable, and I would oppose the practices of such a society as militantly as I think any reader of your publication would.
Murray Bookchin
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The only conclusion I could arrive at with the death of the workers' movement as a revolutionary force - you know the imagery of the proletarian vanguard, or proletarian hegemony - has been the community.
Murray Bookchin
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My thinking is very flexible, and I hope that it will remain flexible and creative as long as biology permits me to think and that I will remain a rebel all my life.
Murray Bookchin
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The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.
Murray Bookchin
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Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.
Murray Bookchin
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When I talk about self-management, self-regulation, self-government, the word I emphasize is self, and my concern is with the reconstruction of the self. Marxists and even many, I think, overly enthusiastic anarchists have neglected that self.
Murray Bookchin
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Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity that will use its collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations, scientific knowledge, and innate creativity for its own benefit and for that of the natural world, all ecological problems will have their roots in social problems.
Murray Bookchin
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The State certainly played a decisive role. I also believe that it may have stemmed from the rivalry itself. Grow or die, devour or die. That's the one problem that I have to wrestle with. I have to wrestle with whether or not rivalry in the free market does not ultimately lead to concentration, corporatism, and finally totalitarianism.
Murray Bookchin
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I think that people who believe in limited government would benefit greatly by studying the logic in government itself and the role of power as a corruptive mechanism in leading finally to unlimited government.
Murray Bookchin
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I have no quarrel with libertarians who advance the concept of capitalism . I believe that people will decide for themselves what they want to do. The all-important thing is that they be free to make that decision and that they do not stand in the way of communities that wish to make other decisions.
Murray Bookchin