Emma Goldman Quotes

We have a lot of societal problems that we have to fix in the 1990s.

I don't think there is a single social issue I haven't spoken on.

People need to focus on bigger issues instead of whether George Bush is an idiot or not.

What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.

A good many people here are disturbed by the practical exhibition of social equality in the arm-in-arm performance of Douglass and Tilton. It does not become radicals like us to particularly object. But it was certainly unfortunate at this time. The old prejudice, now revived, will lose us some votes

There is no political downside to smut bashing.

For every social wrong there must be a remedy.

Because of the perverse, hostile, and malignant state of the opposition [the Federalists], with their faculty of imposing on the public mind and producing excitements, every measure originating with the executive will be attacked.

This relic of antiquity ... is now distinguished only by its absurdity and its gross deflection of public morals.... It is worse than useless... .We hope that our Legislature will soon put an end to this ridiculous farce.

… cases of injustice, and oppression, and tyranny, and the most extravagant bigotry, are in constant occurrence among us every day. It is the custom to trumpet forth much wonder and astonishment at the chief actors therein setting at defiance so completely the opinion of the world; but there is no greater fallacy; it is precisely because they do consult the opinion of their own little world that such things take place at all, and strike the great world dumb with amazement.

So long as we have government by party, the very notion of repose must be foreign to English politics. Agitation is, so to speak, endowed in this country. There is a standing machinery for producing it. There are rewards which can only be obtained by men who excite the public mind, and devise means of persuading one set of persons that they are deeply injured by another.

There are no civilians in 21st-century warfare because the hottest battlefield is the public mind. The front runs between your ears, between your neighbor’s, between mine. The enemy’s objective (and the enemies are numerous) is to capture our thoughts and convictions. Belief is an immensely potent prize.

I have no message or answers to social questions.

In general, when any of us get outraged by relatively minor pop-cultural phenomena, I suspect it's a way of relaxing and not focussing on more daunting and intractable problems, whether personal or social.

Things I've been talking about for a long time as systemic problems, the American public has also begun to see something needs to be done down here.

Drugs, killer roads and apathy of the government, all these issues forced me to join AAP.

We need to start talking, to each other, about the issues that matter most. Otherwise, we are just pawns in the game of politics.

If 'Crazywala' is about the state of politics in our country, 'Nawab Basha' is about how money controls most of our lives.

This formidable censor of the public functionaries [the press], by arraigning them at the tribunal of public opinion, produces reform peaceably, which must otherwise be done by revolution. It is also the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man and improving him as a rational, moral, and social being.

A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills

Statistics have proven that the surest way to get anything out of the public mind and never hear of it again is to have a Senate committee appointed to look into it.

The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.

On March 8 a poll showed Hart 9 points ahead of Reagan. So perhaps 60 million Americans, 55 million of whom had not heard of Hart a month ago, have suddenly decided thay want him to be leader of the free world. The public mind is not just soft wax, it's runny.

Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases.

What is more obscene: the idea that one can apologize for the hubris and deceit that is Obama and his health care, or the actual need some have for an apology from an entity so evil that he would toy with the lives of millions as though they were insects and he God? This is hard to tell.