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

More quotes by 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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Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none.
Peter Kropotkin
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...do not the bewitching power of all studies lie in that they continually open up to us new, unsuspected horizons, not yet understood, which entice us to proceed further and further in the penetration of what appears at first sight only in vague outline?
Peter Kropotkin
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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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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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The two great movements of our century -- towards Liberty of the individual and social co-operation of the whole community -- are summed up in Anarchist-Communism.
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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Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin], your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.
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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Waste of time is the leading feature of our present education. Not only are we taught a mass of rubbish, but what is not rubbish is taught so as to make us waste over it as much time as possible.
Peter Kropotkin
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Revolutions, we must remember, are always made by minorities.
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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I understand regicide as a means of obtaining vengeance for the ruin of our lives, but regicide as a means of obtaining political freedom I could never understand.
Peter Kropotkin
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Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state.
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 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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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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War is the usual condition of Europe. A thirty years' supply of causes of war is always on hand.
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