Top 180 Emma Goldman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being.”

— Emma Goldman

52. “The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer’s ideas or personality.”

— Emma Goldman

53. “Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! All wars are wars among thieves who are too cowardly to fight and who therefore induce the young manhood of the whole world to do the fighting for them.”

— Emma Goldman

54. “Free love? as if love is anything but free. Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love.”

— Emma Goldman

55. “Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.”

— Emma Goldman

56. “Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.”

— Emma Goldman

57. “The contention that a standing army and navy is the best security of peace is about as logical as the claim that the most peaceful citizen is he who goes about heavily armed.”

— Emma Goldman

58. “Militarism consumes the strongest and most productive elements of each nation. Militarism swallows the largest part of the national revenue.”

— Emma Goldman

59. “If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.”

— Emma Goldman

60. “Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony.”

— Emma Goldman

61. “The persecution of the innovator and protestant has always been inspired by fear on the part of constituted authority of having its infallibility questioned and its power undermined.”

— Emma Goldman

62. “The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one’s methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.”

— Emma Goldman

63. “True, we have no conscription; that is, men are not usually forced to enlist in the army, but we have developed a far more exacting and rigid force-necessity.”

— Emma Goldman

64. “Understand one another.”

— Emma Goldman

65. “If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right!”

— Emma Goldman

66. “It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice, which drives the political offender to act.”

— Emma Goldman

67. “Lack of fairness to an opponent is essentially a sign of weakness.”

— Emma Goldman

68. “Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one’s self-respect. For jealous people, like dope-fiends, stoop to the lowest level and in the end inspire only disgust and loathing.”

— Emma Goldman

69. “From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed toward that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that.”

— Emma Goldman

70. “Crime is naught but misdirected energy.”

— Emma Goldman

71. “There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can’t be.”

— Emma Goldman

72. “Public school – where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression.”

— Emma Goldman

73. “To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.”

— Emma Goldman

74. “You have opened up the prison gates of my womanhood. And all the passion that was unsatisfied in for me so many years, leaped into a wild reckless storm boundless as the sea.”

— Emma Goldman

75. “It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.”

— Emma Goldman

76. “Religion is a superstition that originated in man’s mental inability to solve natural phenomena. The Church is an orgainized institution that has always been stumbling to block progress.”

— Emma Goldman

77. “In the face of this approaching disaster, it behooves men and women not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them.”

— Emma Goldman

78. “It is characteristic of theistic “tolerance” that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.”

— Emma Goldman

79. “The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved.”

— Emma Goldman

80. “The State, every government whatever its form, character or color – be it absolute or constitutional, monarchy or republic, Fascist, Nazi or bolshevik – is by its very nature conservative, static, intolerant of change and opposed to it.”

— Emma Goldman

81. “The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.”

— Emma Goldman

82. “Man must get back to himself before he can learn his relation to his fellows. Prometheus chained to the Rock of Ages is doomed to remain the prey of the vultures of darkness. Unbind Prometheus, and you dispel the night and its horrors.”

— Emma Goldman

83. “Why waste your life working for a few shillings a week in a scullery, eighteen hours a day, when a woman could earn a decent wage by selling her body instead?”

— Emma Goldman

84. “Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.”

— Emma Goldman

85. “The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings as in his native land.”

— Emma Goldman

86. “Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion.”

— Emma Goldman

87. “The triumph of the philosophy of Atheism is to free man from the nightmare of gods; it means the dissolution of the phantoms of the beyond.”

— Emma Goldman

88. “The benefits brought to the Russian people by Bolshevism exist only on paper painted in glowing colors by Bolshevist propaganda.”

— Emma Goldman

89. “When we have undermined the patriotic lie, we shall have cleared the path for the great structure where all shall be united into a universal brotherhood – a truly free society.”

— Emma Goldman

90. “Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.”

— Emma Goldman

91. “Give us what belongs to us in peace, and if you don’t give it to us in peace, we will take it by force.”

— Emma Goldman

92. “Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.”

— Emma Goldman

93. “It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.”

— Emma Goldman

94. “The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass.”

— Emma Goldman

95. “The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class...”

— Emma Goldman

96. “The spirit of militarism has already permeated all walks of life. Indeed, I am convinced that militarism is a greater danger here than anywhere else, because of the many bribes capitalism holds out to those whom it wishes to destroy.”

— Emma Goldman

97. “Methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim.”

— Emma Goldman

98. “True emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in the courts. It begins in woman’s soul.”

— Emma Goldman

99. “Democracy must first be safe for America before it can be safe for the world.”

— Emma Goldman

100. “Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested – for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day.”

— Emma Goldman