Top 60 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Anarchy is order, government is civil war.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

2. “Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

3. “When deeds speak, words are nothing.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

4. “Liberty is not the daughter but the mother of order.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

5. “The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

6. “I do not wish to be either governor nor governed!”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

7. “Anarchy, the absence of a master, of a sovereign.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

8. “Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

9. “The possessions of the rich are stolen property.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

10. “As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

11. “Producer and consumer are always one and the same person, merely considered from two different viewpoints.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

12. “Universal suffrage is counter-revolution.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

13. “Property is theft!”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

14. “The proprietor, producing neither by his own labor nor by his implement, and receiving products in exchange for nothing, is either a parasite or a thief.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

15. “Communism is a society where each one works according to his abilities and gets according to his needs.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

16. “We want property, but property restored to its proper limits, that is to say, free distribution of the products of labour, property minus usury!”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

17. “Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

18. “The newspapers are the cemeteries of ideas.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

19. “Humanity wants no more war.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

20. “Property is impossible.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

21. “The idea of God is the type and foundation of the principle of authority and absolutism, which it is our task to destroy or at least to subordinate wherever it manifests itself.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

22. “In any given society the authority of man over man runs in inverse proportion to the intellectual development of that society.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

23. “ANARCHY, or the government of each man by himself or as the English say, self -government.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

24. “Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

25. “Justice is a faculty that may be developed. This development is what constitutes the education of the human race.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

26. “Democracy is nothing but the Tyranny of Majorities, the most abominable tyranny of all, for it is not based on the authority of a religion, not upon the nobility of a race, not on the merits of talents and of riches. It merely rests upon numbers and hides behind the name of the people.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

27. “An empty stomach knows no morality.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

28. “All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

29. “Communism – the first expression of the social nature – is the first term of social development – the thesis; property, the reverse of communism, is the second term – the antithesis. When we have discovered the third term, the synthesis, we shall have the required solution.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

30. “I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

31. “To restore religion, gentlemen, it is necessary to condemn the Church.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

32. “AXIOM. – Property is the Right of Increase claimed by the Proprietor over any thing which he has stamped as his own.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

33. “It is through separation that you will win: no representatives, and no candidates!”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

34. “It is better to enlighten men’s minds than to teach them to be obstinate in their prejudices.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

35. “A common danger tends to concord. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In Communism, inequality comes from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

36. “It is a proof of philosophical mediocrity, today, to look for a philosophy.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

37. “Society was saved by the negation of its own principles, by a revolution in its religion, and by violation of its most sacred rights. In this revolution, the idea of justice spread to an extent that had not before been dreamed of, never to return to its original limits. Heretofore justice had existed only for the masters; it then commenced to exist for the slaves.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

38. “The social revolution is seriously compromised if it comes through a political revolution.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

39. “To name a thing is easy: the difficulty is to discern it before its appearance.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

40. “All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in the words: agricultural-industrial federation. All my political ideas boil down to a similar formula: political federation or decentralization.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

41. “As soon as I set foot in the parliamentary Sinai, I ceased to be in touch with the masses.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

42. “I must say that I recognized at once that we had never understood the meaning of these words, so common and yet so sacred: Justice, equity, liberty; that concerning each of these principles our ideas have been utterly obscure; and, in fact, that this ignorance was the sole cause, both of the poverty that devours us, and of all the calamities that have ever afflicted the human race.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

43. “The nation-king cannot exercise its sovereignty itself; it is obliged to delegate it to agents: this is constantly reiterated by those who seek to win its favor. Be these agents five, ten, one hundred, or a thousand, of what consequence is the number; and what matters the name? It is always the government of man, the rule of will and caprice. I ask what this pretended revolution has revolutionized?”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

44. “Property and society are completely irreconcilable with one another. It is as impossible to associate two proprietors as to join two magnets by their opposite poles. Either society must perish, or it must destroy property.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

45. “The law does not generate justice. The law is nothing but a declaration and application of what is just.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

46. “Yes: all men believe and repeat that equality of conditions is identical with equality of rights; that property and robbery are synonymous terms; that every social advantage accorded, or rather usurped, in the name of superior talent or service, is iniquity and extortion. All men in their hearts, I say, bear witness to these truths; they need only to be made to understand it.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

47. “When politics and home life have become one and the same, when economic problems have been solved in such a way that individual and collective interests are identical – all constraints having disappeared – it is evident that we will be in a state of total liberty or anarchy.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

48. “I have been pitiless in my criticism of the economists: for them I confess that, in general, I have no liking. The arrogance and the emptiness of their writings, their impertinent pride and their unwarranted blunders, have disgusted me. Whoever, knowing them, pardons them, may read them.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

49. “On the one hand, the falsest judgments, whether based on isolated facts or only on appearances, always embrace some truths whose sphere, whether large or small, affords room for a certain number of inferences, beyond which we fall into absurdity.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

50. “To-day, the man who pays taxes to the amount of two hundred francs is virtuous; the talented man is the honest pickpocket: such truths as these are accounted trivial.”

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon