Emma Goldman Quotes

Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.

For the mob, habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors, as soon as it has got a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring, being excluded by poverty from the sweets of civil honors, produces a reign of mere violence.

As there is oppression of the majority such oppression will be fought with increasing hatred.

It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom.

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we do to each other.

Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed

Progress is always relative: to the oppressed, it can only be viewed as an all or nothing deal - if oppression continues, even in a modified form, then the system must still be attacked until that injustice is eradicated.

Riot is the voice of the unheard.

What began as a political protest turned into a class war and a racial pogrom.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful easily break through them.

Social injustice is such a familiar phenomenon ... that it is readily regarded as something natural, even by its victims.

We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.

First, the urban guerrilla must use ... violence ... to win a popular base. Then the government has no alternative except to intensify repression. The police roundups, house searches, arrests of innocent people make life ... unbearable. The general sentiment is that the government is unjust, incapable of solving problems and resorts ... to the physical liquidation of its opponents ...

The historical method is often deemed conservative, because it traces the gradual and stately growth of our venerable institutions; but it may exercise a precisely opposite influence by showing the gross injustice which was blindly perpetrated during this growth. The historical method is supposed to prove that economic changes have been the inevitable outcome of natural laws. It just as often proves them to have been brought about by the self-seeking action of dominant classes.

People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws

… the unjust institutions which work so much misery and suffering to the masses have their root in governments, and owe their whole existence to the power derived from government.

The class which has the power to rob upon a large scale has also the power to control the government and legalize their robbery.

The more we examine the actual course of affairs, the more we are amazed at the unnecessary suffering that has been inflicted upon the people. No generalities about natural law or inevitable development can blind us to the fact, that the progress in which we believe has been won at the expense of much injustice and wrong, which was not inevitable.

I think human societies tend to be problematic.

I can't help but believe that at some time in the not-too-distant future, there is going to be another movement to change these systemic conditions of poverty, injustice, and violence in people's lives. That is where we've got to go, and it is going to be a struggle.

The problem in the world is the oppression of man by man; it this which threatens existence.

I like movies that project a dilemma of modern men and women who are overwhelmed by the system.

It was of limited usefulness to head great rallies. The government did not listen, and, soon enough, the tear gas and the muzzles of the guns were turned against the people. The justice of our cries went unrecognized.

The nature of racism is that it grinds down the soul of the man more finely than it does the soul of the woman. When you want to conquer a people or subject it, you destroy the male component.

'Game of Thrones' has never much concerned itself with shining a torch on the powerless. Their hunger and suffering in a land ravaged by war is of little concern to the story's most powerful characters, whose antics bring so much pain to the people.