Alexander Berkman Quotes

The right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves of oppression, if they are strong enough, whether by withdrawal from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable.

People have a right to violence, to rebel, to fight back.

An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break their fetters.

What has commonly been called rebellion has more often been nothing but a glorious struggle in opposition to the lawless power of rebellious kings and princes

To Arms! ... they [the French] would enslave the free-born mind, and compel us meanly to cringe to usurpation and arbitrary power.

The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.

Special interests and the demented philosophy of conquest have driven most wars throughout history. Rarely has the cause of liberty, as it was in our own revolution, been the driving force.

Fellow citizens: The hour to try your souls and to redeem your pledges has arrived. Stand together in face of the brutal, cowardly enemies of your race! Bring English tyranny to its knees. Pay no rent under any pretext! The government, with its bayonets, will learn in a single Winter how powerless are armed forces against the will of a united determined, and self-reliant nation.

Our vengeance shall rival Spanish ferocity. Our goodwill is at last exhausted; and, since our oppressors compel us to mortal warfare, they shall disappear from America and our land shall be purged of the monsters that infest it. Our hate shall be inexorable and our war shall be to the death.

I went to Boston fully expecting to be arrested - arrested by a polizia created by a government that my ancestors rebelled to establish.

Our forefathers would think it's time for a revolution. This is why they revolted in the first place... They revolted against much more mild oppression.

A single good government becomes... a blessing to the whole earth, its welcome to the oppressed restraining within certain limits the measure of their oppressions. But should even this be counteracted by violence on the right of expatriation, the other branch of our example then presents itself for imitation: to rise on their rulers and do as we have done.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.

Not peace at any price! Chains are worse than bayonets.

We continue to resist the occupier militarily, culturally and by all means of the resistance.

Everywhere that freedom stirs, let tyrants fear.

It will be a war of national liberation. We believe the people reject totalitarianism.

That liberty is a great thing we may know from our own feelings, and we may likewise judge so from the conduct of the white-people, in the late war.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.

He that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defence of reason rebels against tyranny has a better title to Defender of the Faith, than George the Third.

If we got into a situation where people start burning our records, then bring it on. That's the whole point. The gloaming has begun. We're in the darkness. This has happened before. Go read some history.

Once people sense their own power, no authoritarian government can stand against the people who are determined to be free.