Top 180 Emma Goldman Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather: Understand one another.”

— Emma Goldman

152. “The masses are crude, lame, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them but to drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.”

— Emma Goldman

153. “What I prized most was freedom, freedom to do my work, to give myself spontaneously and not out of duty or by command. I could not submit to such demands; rather would I choose the path of a homeless wanderer; yes, even go without love.”

— Emma Goldman

154. “If society were only relieved of the waste and expense of keeping a lazy class, and the equally great expense of the paraphernalia of protection this lazy class requires, the social tables would contain an abundance for all, including even the occasional lazy individual.”

— Emma Goldman

155. “No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law?”

— Emma Goldman

156. “There is no hope even that woman, with her right to vote, will ever purify politics.”

— Emma Goldman

157. “Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor?”

— Emma Goldman

158. “Always, at every period, the few were the banner bearers of a great idea, of liberating effort. Not so the mass, the leaden weight of which does not let it move.”

— Emma Goldman

159. “Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society.”

— Emma Goldman

160. “No, it is not because woman is lacking in responsibility, but because she has too much of the latter that she demands to know how to prevent conception.”

— Emma Goldman

161. “I discovered that those who want their property to be respected, have an interest in preaching the existence of paradise and hell, and in keeping the people in ignorance.”

— Emma Goldman

162. “After all, that is what laws are for, to be made and unmade.”

— Emma Goldman

163. “We shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next door neighbors should hear that freeborn citizens dare not speak in the open.”

— Emma Goldman

164. “The guilt of these homicides lies upon every man and woman who, intentionally or by cold indifference, helps to keep up social conditions that drive human beings to despair.”

— Emma Goldman

165. “Industry is the ceaseless piracy of the rich against the poor.”

— Emma Goldman

166. “The State has no more existence than gods and devils have. They are equally the reflex and creation of man, for man, the individual, is the only reality. The State is but the shadow of man, the shadow of his opaqueness, of his ignorance and fear.”

— Emma Goldman

167. “How to raise this dead level of theistic belief is really a matter of life and death for all denominations. Therefore their tolerance; but it is a tolerance not of understanding; but of weakness.”

— Emma Goldman

168. “To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.”

— Emma Goldman

169. “Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.”

— Emma Goldman

170. “We, who pay dearly for every breath of pure, fresh air, must guard against the tendency to fetter the future.”

— Emma Goldman

171. “Few countries have produced such arrogance and snobbishness as America.”

— Emma Goldman

172. “Morality and its victim, the mother – what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?”

— Emma Goldman

173. “Whether love last but one brief span of time or for eternity, it is the only creative, inspiring, elevating basis for a new race, a new world.”

— Emma Goldman

174. “Prison, a social protection? What monstrous mind ever conceived such an idea? Just as well say that health can be promoted by a widespread contagion!”

— Emma Goldman

175. “Destruction and violence! How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance; that its power of destruction is the very thing Anarchism is combating? Nor is he aware that Anarchism, whose roots, as it were, are part of nature’s forces, destroys, not healthful tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life’s essence of society. It is merely clearing the soil from weeds and sagebrush, that it may eventually bear healthy fruit.”

— Emma Goldman

176. “The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weakness of human nature.”

— Emma Goldman

177. “A true conception of the relation of the sexes will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows of but one great thing; to give of one’s self boundlessly, in order to find one’s self richer, deeper, better.”

— Emma Goldman

178. “To call the State an organism shows a diseased tendency to make a fetish of words.”

— Emma Goldman

179. “A thorough investigation would prove that nine crimes out of ten could be traced, directly or indirectly, to our economic and social iniquities, to our system of remorseless exploitation and robbery.”

— Emma Goldman

180. “The awful waste that patriotism necessitates ought to be sufficient to cure the man of even average intelligence from this disease. Yet patriotism demands still more. The people are urged to be patriotic and for that luxury they pay, not only by supporting their “defenders,” but even by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegiance to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister.”

— Emma Goldman

181. “Even were the workers able to have their own representatives, for which our good Socialist politicians are clamoring, what chances are there for their honesty and good faith?”

— Emma Goldman

182. “The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between two walls.”

— Emma Goldman

183. “Sure, nothing succeeds like success. Fact is, dearest, we are fools. We cling to an ideal no one wants or cares about. I am the greater fool of the two of us. I go on eating out my heart and poisoning every moment of my life in the attempt to rouse people’s sensibilities. At least if I could do it with closed eyes. The irony is I see the futility of my efforts and yet I can’t let go.”

— Emma Goldman

184. “The State is a term for the legislative and administrative machinery whereby certain business of the people is transacted, and badly so.”

— Emma Goldman

185. “There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another. This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.”

— Emma Goldman

186. “Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?”

— Emma Goldman

187. “Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world, the mottos of which are: “To take is more blessed than to give”; “buy cheap and sell dear”; “one soiled hand washes the other.”

— Emma Goldman

188. “The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that from early infancy the mind of the child is provided with blood-curdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc.”

— Emma Goldman

189. “The problem that confronts us today, and which the nearest future is to solve, is how to be one’s self and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one’s own characteristic qualities.”

— Emma Goldman

190. “The spoken word, if hurled forth with eloquence, enthusiasm, and fire, could never be erased from the human soul.”

— Emma Goldman

191. “If there would have been a bomb thrown, I surely would have been blamed for it.”

— Emma Goldman