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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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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
Reality
Institutions
Dream
Worse
States
Thousand
Better
Told
Made
Asks
Always
State
Abolition
Men
Society
Composed
Times
Organs

More quotes by Peter Kropotkin

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Cleverly assorted scraps of spurious science are inculcated upon the children to prove necessity of law obedience to the law is made a religion moral goodness and the law of the masters are fused into one and the same divinity. The historical hero of the schoolroom is the man who obeys the law, and defends it against rebels.
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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Think about the world you want to live and work in. What do you need to know to build the world? Demand that your teachers teach you that.
Peter Kropotkin
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You know how I always believe in the future. Without disorder, the revolution is impossible knowing that, I did not lose hope, and I do not lose it now.
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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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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Revolutions, we must remember, are always made by minorities.
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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Educated men - civilized, as Fourier used to say with disdain - tremble at the idea that society might some day be without judges, police, or gaolers.
Peter Kropotkin
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Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none.
Peter Kropotkin
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My brother could not write about trifles. Even in society he became animated only when some serious discussion was engaged in, and he complained of feeling 'a dull pain in the brain'--a physical pain, as he used to say--when he was with people who cared only for small talk.
Peter Kropotkin
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The immense and ever increasing sums which the state wrings from the people are never enough for it it mortgages the income of future generations, and steers resolutely toward bankruptcy.
Peter Kropotkin
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The future cannot be legislated. All that can be done is to anticipate its most important movements and to clear the path for them.
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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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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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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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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Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin], your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.
Peter Kropotkin
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The hopeless don't revolt, because revolution is an act of hope.
Peter Kropotkin