But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it endure under Anarchism?Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from...

Freedom, or individual liberty, was a basic premise of the Spanish anarchist tradition. “Individual sovereignty” is a prime tenet of most anarchist writing; the free development of one’ s individual potential is one of the...

You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you’ll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than...

The important question is, therefore, not whether anarchy is possible or not, but whether we can so enlarge the scope and influence of libertarian methods that they become the normal way in which human beings...

do more in less time” is not a neutral force in our culture; it is the handmaiden of miserable experts, specialists, and leaders. Not everyone has rushed to become efficient. Something else exists on the...

Regarding the need to pray, the anarch is again no different from anyone else. But he does not like to attach himself. He does not squander his best energies. He accepts no substitute for his...

We have been expropriated from our own language by television, from our songs by reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornography, from our city by the police and from our friends by wage-labor.

Our masters have not heard the people’s voice for generations and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.

What is common becomes sense, but what is sensible doesn’t always become common.

At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned

The principles of liberalism can have a real existence only in conjunction with a police system. Anarchism is an attempt to cleanse liberalism of the police. But just as pure oxygen is impossible to breathe,...

The continued appeal of anarchism can probably be attributed to its enduring affinity with both the rational and emotional impulses lying deep within us. It is an attitude, a way of life as well as...

Victory will not go to those who can inflict the most suffering, but to those who can survive the most.

No genuine revolutionary challenge to either the State or Capitalism in the United States can fail to ignore racism’s importance in maintaining the current system.

I have often been asked why I maintained such a non-compromising antagonism to government and in what way I have found myself oppressed by it. In my opinion every individual is hampered by it. It...

Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are, rather, forced upon parliaments from without. And even their enactment into law has for a long time been no guarantee of their security. Just as the...

The real enemy” is the totality of physical and mental constraints by which capital, or class society, or statism, or the society of the spectacle expropriates everyday life, the time of our lives. The real...

After simmering years of censorship and repression, the masses finally throng the streets. The chants echoing off the walls to build to a roar from all directions, stoking the courage of the crowds as they...

One of the most inefficient utopias I have ever seen was that of a humble Zapatista village in the mountains of Southeastern Mexico. I kid you not, the entire village sits down and takes days...

The anarch differs from the anarchist in that he has a very pronounced sense of the rules. Insofar as and to the extent that he observes them, he feels exempt from thinking.This is consistent with...

To call the population of strangers in the midst of which we live “society” is such a usurpation that even the sociologists wonder if they should abandon a concept that was, for a century, their...

Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history’s fingers, down it goes.

Media is an assemblage of tools with which to expand an audience’s conception of what “the world” is to such and extent that their own lives and capabilities seem utterly insignificant; a means of psychological...

If crimes are committed they must be seen as a disease, and punishment as treatment rather than as social vengeance.

Plantie is a very strong Protestant, that is to say, he’s against all churches, especially the Protestant: and he thinks a lot of Buddha, Karma and Confucius. He is also a bit of an anarchist...

If Adam and Eve were not hunter-gatherers, then they were certainly gatherers. But, then, consumer desire, or self-embitterment, or the ‘itch,’ as Schopenhauer called it, appeared in the shape of the serpent. This capitalistic monster...

If you are a warrior, the nature and scale of your enemies will determine the nature and scale of your actions. In this sense, it is even more important to choose your enemies more wisely...

We don’t need unity in theory, we need solidarity in practice.

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.

That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden...

Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of...

Because I care about human beings, I want them to be free to do what is right for them. Isn’t that more important than mere peace on earth? Isn’t freedom, even dangerous freedom, preferable to...

An anarchist is someone who rejects the curious notion that crimes become virtues as they grow in size.

I begin with the respect that the anarch shows towards the rules. Respectare as an intensive of respicere means: ‘to look back, to think over, to take into account.’ These are traffic rules. The anarchist...

The social system of capital separates most people from the conditions of existence. This compels the vast majority to accept the mediations of work and commodity consumption in order to maintain a minimal existence at...

Authority, when first detecting chaos at its heels, will entertain the vilest schemes to save its orderly facade.

Right and wrong are superstitions; your desires, however, are real. Those who cannot achieve their desires, or who despair of doing so, often compensate by constructing imaginary frameworks. For example, if you wish to live...

Far from checking the spread of immorality, repression has always extended and deepended it. Thus it is futile to oppose it by rigorous legislation which trespasses on individual liberty.

One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . ‘Libertarians’ . ....

Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and...

No one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live; no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential unless you invite them to.

The voices of actual communities are alive in a way no theory could every be even if, for now, it takes the form of tiny acts of resistance. Who doesn’t cheat on taxes, avoid cops,...

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.

Modern industrial civilisation has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilisation has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that...

The faithful of Shiva or Dionysus seek contact with those forces which…lead to a refusal of the politics, ambitions and limitations of ordinary social life. This does not involve simply a recognition of world harmony,...

At first, one only recognizes particular instances to be worth of critique; critique appears synonymous with rejection, implying deficiency in the object. Over time, one discovers that everything warrants critique. This can produce cynicism: nothing...

A libertarian is someone who graduated from thinking that there are problems with the state to realizing that the state is the problem.

The anarchist, as the born foe of authority, will be destroyed by it after damaging it more or less. The anarch, on the other hand, has appropriated authority; he is sovereign. He therefore behaves as...

Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin), your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of...

I am he.