Top 35 Pyotr Kropotkin Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Poverty, we have said elsewhere, was the primary cause of wealth. It was poverty that created the first capitalist; because, before accumulating “surplus value,” of which we hear so much, men had to be sufficiently destitute to consent to sell their labour, so as not to die of hunger. It was poverty that made capitalists.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

2. “But capital goes wherever there are men, poor enough to be exploited.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

3. “Why has woman’s work never been of any account? Why in every family are the mother and three or four servants obliged to spend so much time at what pertains to cooking? Because those who want to emancipate mankind have not included woman in their dream of emancipation, and consider it beneath their superior masculine dignity to think “of those kitchen arrangements,” which they have put on the shoulders of that drudge – woman.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

4. “Don’t compete! – competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

5. “All is for all! If the man and the woman bear their fair share of work, they have a right to their fair share of all that is produced by all, and that share is enough to secure them well-being. No more of such vague formulas as “The right to work,” or “To each the whole result of his labour.” What we proclaim is The Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All!”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

6. “The most important economy, the only reasonable one, is to make life pleasant for all, because the man who is satisfied with his life produces infinitely more than the man who curses his surroundings.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

7. “Inevitably, industry is directed, and will have to be directed, not towards what is needed to satisfy the needs of all, but towards that which, at a given moment, brings in the greatest temporary profit to a few.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

8. “Well-being for all is not a dream.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

9. “Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

10. “Struggle! To struggle is to live, and the fiercer the struggle the intenser the life. Then you will have lived; and a few hours of such life are worth years spent vegetating.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

11. “Shoddy pay – shoddy work!”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

12. “We do not want to rob any one of his coat, but we wish to give to the workers all those things the lack of which makes them fall an easy prey to the exploiter, and we will do our utmost that none shall lack aught, that not a single man shall be forced to sell the strength of his right arm to obtain a bare subsistence for himself and his babes.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

13. “It seems to us that there is only one answer to this question: we must recognize, and loudly proclaim, that everyone, whatever his grade in the old society, whether strong or weak, capable or incapable, has, before everything, the right to live, and that society is bound to share among all, without exception, the means of existence it has at its disposal. We must acknowledge this, and proclaim it aloud, and act upon it.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

14. “Take heed that if you deceive, lie, intrigue, cheat, you thereby demean yourself. belittle yourself, confess your own weakness beforehand, play the part of the slave of the harem who feels himself the inferior of his master. Do this if it so pleases you, but know that humanity will regard you as petty, contemptible and feeble, and treat you as such. Having no evidence of your strength, it will act towards you as one worthy of pity – and pity only.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

15. “Equality in mutual relations with the solidarity arising from it, this is the most powerful weapon of the animal world in the struggle for existence. And equality is equity.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

16. “We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We called those the barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die of hunger. The.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

17. “That we are utopians is well known. So utopian are we that we go the length of believing that the revolution can and ought to assure shelter, food and clothes to all – an idea extremely displeasing to middle-class citizens, whatever their party colour, for they are quite alive to the fact that it is not easy to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger is satisfied.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

18. “Wage-work is serf-work; it cannot, it must not, produce all that it could produce. And it is high time to disbelieve the legend which represents wagedom as the best incentive to productive work. If industry nowadays brings in a hundred times more than it did in the days of our grandfathers, it is due to the sudden awakening of physical and chemical sciences towards the end of last century; not to the capitalist organization of wagedom, but in spite of that organization.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

19. “In virtue of this monstrous system, the son of the worker, on entering life, finds no field which he may till, no machine which he may tend, no mine in which he may dig, without accepting to leave a great part of what he will produce to a master. He must sell his labour for a scant and uncertain wage. His father and his grandfather have toiled to drain this field, to build this mill, to perfect this machine. They gave to the work the full measure of their strength, and what more could they give?”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

20. “It is not difficult, indeed, to see the absurdity of naming a few men and saying to them, “Make laws regulating all our spheres of activity, although not one of you knows anything about them!”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

21. “And if you talk to the workmen themselves, you will soon learn that the rule in such factories is – never to do your best. “Shoddy pay – shoddy work!” this is the advice which the working man receives from his comrades upon entering such a factory.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

22. “One of the greatest achievements of modern science was, that it proved the indestructibility of energy through all the ceaseless transformations which it undergoes in the universe.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

23. “Engineers, scientists, and doctors merely exploit their capital – their diplomas – as middle-class employers exploit a factory, or as nobles used to exploit their titles of nobility.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

24. “If we can wander, without fear, not only in the streets of Paris, which bristle with police, but especially in rustic walks where you rarely meet passersby, is it to the police that we owe this security? or rather to the absence of people who care to rob or murder us?”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

25. “Letters and science will only take their proper place in the work of human development when, freed from all mercenary bondage, they will be exclusively cultivated by those who love them, and for those who love them.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

26. “Today we live side by side without knowing one another. We come together at meetings on an election day: we listen to the lying or fanciful professions of faith of a candidate, and we return home. The State has the care of all questions of public interest; the State alone has the function of seeing that we do not harm the interests of our neighbor, and, if it fails in this, of punishing us in order to repair the evil.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

27. “And while English workmen are often unemployed and in great want, Indian women weave cotton by machinery, for the Far East at wages of six-pence a day. In short, the intelligent manufacturers are fully aware that the day is not far off when they will not know what to do with the “factory hands” who formerly wove cotton-cloth for export from England.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

28. “But today the united city has ceased to exist; there is no more communion of ideas. The town is a chance agglomeration of people who do not know one another, who have no common interest, save that of enriching themselves at the expense of one another.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

29. “All that was once looked on as a function of the government is today called in question. Things are arranged more easily and more satisfactorily without the intervention of the state. And in studying the progress made in this direction, we are led to conclude that the tendency of the human race is to reduce government interference to zero; in fact, to abolish the state, the personification of injustice, oppression and monopoly.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

30. “In The Descent of Man he gave some powerful pages to illustrate its proper, wide sense. He pointed out how, in numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation, and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

31. “If you wish, like us, that the entire liberty of the individual and, consequently, his life be respected, you are necessarily brought to repudiate the government of man by man, whatever shape it assumes; you are forced to accept the principles of Anarchy that you have spurned so long. You must then search with us the forms of society that can best realize that ideal and put an end to all the violence that rouses your indignation.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

32. “In fact, we know full well today that it is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

33. “If middle-class society is decaying, if we have got into a blind alley from which we cannot emerge without attacking past institutions with torch and hatchet, it is precisely because we have given too much to counting. It is because we have let ourselves be influenced into giving only to receive. It is because we have aimed at turning society into a commercial company based on debit and credit.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

34. “Should an authoritarian Socialist society ever succeed in establishing itself, it could not last; general discontent would soon force it to break up, or to reorganize itself on principles of liberty.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

35. “The more we study the question, the more we are brought to the conclusion that society itself is responsible for the anti-social deeds perpetrated in its midst; and that no punishments, no prisons, and no hangmen can diminish the numbers of such deeds; nothing short of a re-organisation of society itself.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

36. “Man is not a being whose exclusive purpose in life is eating, drinking, and providing a shelter for himself. As soon as his material wants are satisfied, other needs, which, generally speaking may be described as of an artistic character, will thrust themselves forward. These needs are of the greatest variety; they vary with each and every individual; and the more society is civilized, the more will individuality be developed, and the more will desires be varied.”

— Pyotr Kropotkin