Top 180 Emma Goldman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Politicians promise you heaven before an election and give you hell after.”

— Emma Goldman

Featured in: Hard Hitting Quotes, Liars Quotes, Corruption Quotes, Disappointment Quotes, Heaven Quotes

2. “The most violent element in society is ignorance.”

— Emma Goldman

3. “A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.”

— Emma Goldman

4. “I’d rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.”

— Emma Goldman

5. “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

— Emma Goldman

6. “People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.”

— Emma Goldman

7. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”

— Emma Goldman

8. “Out of the chaos the future emerges in harmony and beauty.”

— Emma Goldman

9. “Ask for work. If they don’t give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.”

— Emma Goldman

10. “If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.”

— Emma Goldman

11. “I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.”

— Emma Goldman

12. “Life without an ideal is spiritual death.”

— Emma Goldman

13. “What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!”

— Emma Goldman

14. “Direct action is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.”

— Emma Goldman

15. “Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in.”

— Emma Goldman

Featured in: Strong Quotes

16. “Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.”

— Emma Goldman

17. “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

18. “No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.”

— Emma Goldman

19. “Patriotism is a menace to liberty.”

— Emma Goldman

20. “The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.”

— Emma Goldman

21. “I don’t care if a man’s theory for tomorrow is correct, I care if his spirit of today is correct.”

— Emma Goldman

22. “Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to Liberty.”

— Emma Goldman

23. “Those who sit in a glass house do wrong to throw stones about them; besides, the American glass house is rather thin, it will break easily, and the interior is anything but a gainly sight.”

— Emma Goldman

24. “Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.”

— Emma Goldman

25. “Every society has the criminals it deserves.”

— Emma Goldman

26. “We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America.”

— Emma Goldman

27. “When in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.”

— Emma Goldman

28. “Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.”

— Emma Goldman

29. “Jealousy is the very reverse of understanding, of sympathy, and of generous feeling. Never has jealousy added to character, never does it make the individual big and fine.”

— Emma Goldman

30. “Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.”

— Emma Goldman

31. “The majority cares little for ideals and integrity. What it craves is display.”

— Emma Goldman

32. “I believe – indeed, I know – that whatever is fine and beautiful in the human expresses and asserts itself in spite of government, and not because of it.”

— Emma Goldman

33. “Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is more binding, more exacting.”

— Emma Goldman

34. “In modern capitalism economic exploitation rather than political oppression is the real enemy of the people.”

— Emma Goldman

35. “Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soulless army of human prey.”

— Emma Goldman

36. “Love needs no protection; it is its own protection.”

— Emma Goldman

37. “Art is a part of the rebellion against the realities of its unfulfilled desire.”

— Emma Goldman

38. “What I believe is a process rather than a finality.”

— Emma Goldman

39. “Modern woman is no longer satisfied to be the beloved of a man; she looks for understanding, comradeship; she wants to be treated as a human being and not simply as an object for sexual gratification.”

— Emma Goldman

40. “Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man’s enslavement and all the horrors it entails.”

— Emma Goldman

41. “The most vital right is the right to love and be loved.”

— Emma Goldman

42. “When we can’t dream any longer we die.”

— Emma Goldman

43. “Revolution is indeed a violent process. But if it is to result only in a change of dictatorship, in a shifting of names and political personalities, then it is hardly worth while.”

— Emma Goldman

44. “There’s never been a good government.”

— Emma Goldman

45. “All claims of education notwithstanding, the pupil will accept only that which his mind craves.”

— Emma Goldman

46. “You cannot build up a standing army and then throw it back into a box like tin soldiers. Armies equipped to the teeth with weapons, with highly developed instruments of murder and backed by their military interests, have their own dynamic functions.”

— Emma Goldman

47. “The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called “society,” or the “nation,” which is only a collection of individuals.”

— Emma Goldman

48. “Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be.”

— Emma Goldman

49. “Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name!”

— Emma Goldman

50. “Pettiness separates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big.”

— Emma Goldman