Emma Goldman Quotes

If you read all the time what other people have done, you will the think the way they thought.

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything -- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular- and too lazy to think of anything better.

How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies.

Once you start copying other people's licks, you begin thinking they're yours. Doing that's just an easy way out.

Imitation is for shirkers, like-minded-ness for the comfort lovers, unifying for the creators.

Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.

I realize that we all do express ourselves, but those who express that which is always being done are those whose thinking is almost in every way in accord with everyone else. Expression on this basis has become dull to those who wish to think for themselves.

I think the enemy of creativity in the world today is that so much thinking is done for you.

I was like a well trained pianist who knows which note to hit, but can't make the music his own.

In morals, always do as others do; in art, never.

To be different is not necessarily to be ugly; to have a different idea is not necessarily to be wrong. The worst possible thing is for all of us to begin to look and talk and act and think alike.

If you're always looking at someone else, trying to imitate them, how can your natural gifts ever emerge?

I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.

Yet I'm sure there's something more to be read in a man. People dare not -- they dare not turn the page. The laws of mimicry -- I call them the laws of fear. People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don't find themselves at all. I hate this moral agoraphobia -- it's the worst kind of cowardice. You can't create something without being alone. But who's trying to create here? What seems different in yourself: that's the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that's just what we try to suppress. We imitate. And we claim to love life.

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.

There is nothing original; all is reflected light.

It is one thing to remember, another to know. To remember is to safeguard something entrusted to the memory. But to know is to make each thing one's own, not depend on the text and always to look back to the teacher. "Zeno said this, Cleanthes said this." Let there be space between you and the book.

Who has no own conviction dissipates himself in the imitation of others.

I think if you study--if you learn too much of what others have done, you may tend to take the same direction as everybody else.

If you try all different styles that are in vogue, I think you con yourself. Me, I just stick by my guns; I don't want to play out of another man's bag.