Emma Goldman Quotes

O, popular applause! what heart of man is proof against thy sweet, seducing charms?

Though the male can be noble in reason and infinite in faculties, he is also easily amused by shiny toys, especially ones that do dumb things on his desk.

Romance, like the rabbit at the dog track, is the elusive, fake, and never attained reward which, for the benefit and amusement of our masters, keeps us running and thinking in safe circles.

The bulk of mankind have indeed, in all countries in their turn, been made the prey of ambition.

Take mankind in general; they are vicious, their passions may be operated upon.

I find it really hard to stick to one thing because I'm so fickle and I like to change my mind a lot.

People are always jumping at what's new - who's the next person, who's the hottest thing, or whatever - so to be able to grasp the attention of everybody is difficult.

The mainstream is very fickle. If you're hot, they'll mess with you. If you're not, it's out of there.

Human beings have become so insensitive to daily life, they don't remember what happened five minutes back.

Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals for the most part governed by the impulse of passion. This is a truth well understood by our adversaries who have practised upon it with no small benefit to their cause. For at the very moment they are eulogizing the reason of men & professing to appeal only to that faculty, they are courting the strongest & most active passion of the human heart - VANITY!

It is the human wish to be told lies that keep us as primitive morally and socially as we are. I am persuaded that a lie grounded in human desire is too powerful for mere reason to kill.

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV

It is a truth of human nature that we can ponder life's mysteries for only so long before we lose interest and move on to something else.

Men, like musical instruments, seem made to be played upon.

The powers know that the people at large are like children whose despair, sorrow, and tears can be turned into joy with a little toy. ... An army and navy represents the people's toys.

As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.

If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.

Mountains of gold would not seduce some men, yet flattery would break them down.

The purpose of bread and circuses is, as Neil Postman said in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, to distract, to divert emotional energy towards the absurd and the trivial and the spectacle while you are ruthlessly stripped of power.

Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.

Once we know that people are human and have some Homer Simpson in them, then there's a lot that can be done to manipulate them.

...people are by nature fickle, and it is easy to persuade them of something, but difficult to keep them persuaded.

I don't think most people take honest well. They prefer the games. They want to believe the pretty lies.

If you keep it," Daneca says, "he'll have his claws in you." Everyone has their claws in me. Everyone.

I wandered over across the hall where they were showing a short movie about vasectomies. Much later I told her that I'd actually gotten a vasectomy a long time ago, and somebody else must have gotten her pregnant. I also told her once that I had inoperable cancer and would soon be passed away and gone, eternally. But nothing I could think up, no matter how dramatic or horrible, ever made her repent or love me the way she had at first, before she really knew me.