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Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?

Peter Kropotkin

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Peter Kropotkin
Age: 78 †
Born: 1842
Born: December 9
Died: 1921
Died: February 8
Anarchist
Autobiographer
Economist
Explorer
Geographer
Journalist
Philosopher
Politician
Writer
Zoologist
Moscow
Russian SFSR
Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
Pyotr Kropotkin
Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin
P. Kropotkin
P. A. Kropotkin
Prince Peter Krapotkin
Wall
Walls
Within
Spots
Force
Vices
Enclose
Character
University
Prisons
Always
Mets
Universities
Men
Prison
Globe
Kill
Globes
Crime
Spot

More quotes by Peter Kropotkin

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The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission its only purpose is to protect exploitation.
Peter Kropotkin
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It is often said that Anarchists live in a world of dreams to come, and do not see the things which happen today. We do see them only too well, and in their true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forest of prejudice that besets us.
Peter Kropotkin
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It is only by the abolition of the State, by the conquest of perfect liberty by the individual, by free agreement, association, and absolute free federation that we can reach Communism — the possession in common of our social inheritance, and the production in common of all riches.
Peter Kropotkin
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Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. 'Read poetry,' he wrote: 'poetry makes men better.' How often, in my later life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better.
Peter Kropotkin
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True progress lies in the direction of decentralization, both territorial and functional, in the development of the spirit of local and personal initiative, and of free federation from the simple to the compound, in lieu of the present hierarchy from the centre to the periphery.
Peter Kropotkin
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But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a moldy bit of bread when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children?
Peter Kropotkin
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When we ask for the abolition of the State and its organs we are always told that we dream of a society composed of men better than they are in reality. But no a thousand times, no. All we ask is that men should not be made worse than they are, by such institutions!
Peter Kropotkin
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The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.
Peter Kropotkin
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A national movement, which does not include in its platform the demand for an economical change advantageous to the masses has no chance of success unless supported by foreign aid.
Peter Kropotkin
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War is the usual condition of Europe.
Peter Kropotkin
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All this we see, and, therefore, instead of inanely repeating the old formula, Respect the law, we say, Despise law and all its Attributes! In place of the cowardly phrase, Obey the law, our cry, is Revolt against all laws!
Peter Kropotkin
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It is only those who do nothing who makes no mistake.
Peter Kropotkin
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Any revolutionary agitation exacts enormous sacrifices, not so much in terms of prison sentences and years of incarceration - which have been raining down by the hundreds of years annually - as in terms of the manifold personal sacrifices sustained by those who commit themselves to revolutionary agitation.
Peter Kropotkin
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The moral sense is a natural faculty in us like the sense of smell or of touch.
Peter Kropotkin
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He objected, though, to indiscriminate reading. 'One must have some question,' he wrote, 'addressed to the book one is going to read.
Peter Kropotkin
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You reason like the king, who, being sent across the frontier, called out, 'What will become of my poor subjects without me?'
Peter Kropotkin
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We take men for what they are worth - and that is why we hate the government of man by man, and that we work with all our might - perhaps not strong enough - to put an end to it.
Peter Kropotkin
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Poverty, the existence of the poor, was the first cause of riches.
Peter Kropotkin
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Men passionately desire to live after death, but they often pass away without noticing the fact that the memory of a really good person always lives. It is impressed upon the next generation, and is transmitted again to the children. Is that not an immortality worth striving for?
Peter Kropotkin
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As an anarchist, I cannot reconcile myself to any government.
Peter Kropotkin