Lucy E. Parsons Quotes

Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at.

In the modern world, it is not the poor and the oppressed who have led the great revolutions and/or carried out the worst deeds of violence; rather, it is militant vanguards from among the better educated and more moneyed circles of society.

We have two American flags always; one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it, it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it, it means danger, revolution.

Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hands, and an infinite scorn in our hearts.

To judge from all Communist papers, magazines and brochures, and from all public assemblies, one might even surmise that a revolt of the poor peasants in Western Europe might break out at any moment!

Peace to the shacks! War on the palaces!

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.

Revolutions break out when opposite parties, the rich and the poor, are equally balanced, and there is little or nothing between them.

I came to the cities in a time of disorder When hunger ruled. I came among men in a time of uprising And I revolted with them.

The most dreaded of all wars, the war of the poor against the rich … will come and come with all its horrors.

All revolutions invariably encourage bad characters and potential criminals.

Let us strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest.

The great appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise.

Be committed to … smashing feudalists, conservatives, and imperialists who are "reactionaries".

If any Irishman shall harbor or relieve any English that be suffered to escape them with his life, that it shall be penal even to death to such Irish, and so they shall be sure even though they put not those English to the sword yet they do as certainly and more cruelly cut them off that way than if they had done it by the sword... And they profess that they will never give over until they leave not any seed of an Englishman in Ireland

We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth

As recognized since ancient times, the coexistence of very rich and very poor leads to two possibilities, neither a happy one. The rich can rule alone, disenfranchising or even enslaving the poor, or the poor can rise up and confiscate the wealth of the rich.

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

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

We have confirmed something we only knew in theory, namely that revolution, in which uncontrolled and uncontrollable forces operate imperiously, is blind and destructive, grandiose and cruel.

A revolution is an act of violence whereby one class shatters the authority of another.

I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people, the good working people.

There are precedents for what happens when societies allow the divide between rich and poor to get so huge that it stops being funny and starts becoming a sick, blood-boiling joke. If you had a Tardis, you could go back to 1917 and ask the Russian royal family how it was all going.

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

They make revolutionary propaganda because they know the privileged class can never be overturned peacefully.