Emma Goldman Quotes

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.

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

Demonstrate before the palaces of the rich; demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right.

I don't want tea, I want justice!

Strikes and boycotting are akin to war, and can be justified only on grounds analogous to those which justify war, viz., intolerable injustice and oppression.

Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all.

Some laws are wrong, and we have an obligation to speak out against those laws wherever they are.

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

And the spirit of revolution will not die while the hearts of these workers continue to beat.

The labor movement means just this: it is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.

Labor has no quarrel with capital, as such. It is merely the possessors of capital who refuse to accord to labor the recognition, the right, the justice which is the laborers' due, with whom we contend.

If there be no right to rebellion against a state of things that no savage tribe would endure without resistance, then I am sure it is better for men to fight and die without right than to live in such a state of right as this.

Every man has a right to bread.

As Justice gives every Man a Title to the product of his honest industry, and the fair Acquisitions of his Ancestors descended to him; so Charity gives every Man a Title to so much out of another’s plenty, as will keep him from extreme want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise.

No right dies so long as someone demands it.

If our Constitution is destroyed, if our right to free speech is denied, then we have the right to use whatever means necessary to survive and advance our position.

We cannot have a situation where people decide to sit in places not allowed and when police remove them they say no. We can’t have that. That is a revolt to the system. Some are crying that they were beaten. Yes you will be thoroughly beaten. When the police say move, you move. If you don’t move, you invite the police to use force.

Protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more.

I regard this type of boycott as ill-concieved, ill-considered, and futile…. I regard it as unjust and cruel to confound the innocent with the guilty.

Historians have often censored civil rights activists' commitment to economic issues and misrepresented the labor and civil rights movements as two separate, sometimes adversarial efforts. But civil rights and workers' rights are two sides of the same coin.

Dr. King's last campaign was a labor struggle. Many people are aware that King was assassinated in Memphis in the spring of 1968. Less well-known is what drew him there: solidarity with city sanitation workers, who, without the benefit of union representation, were rising up to protest humiliating pay and deplorable working conditions.

The principles of fairness and equality for working men and women are deeply interwoven within the fabric of our nation's history.

As long as the superstition that people should obey unjust laws exists, so long will slavery exist

A fair day's wage for a fair day's work": it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man.