Emma Goldman Quotes

Political power means the capacity to regulate national life through national representatives.

Whoever can conquer the street will one day conquer the state.

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.

In every Revolution a dictator is needed to save the state by force, or censors to save it by virtue.

In its mad passion for power, the Communist State even sought to strengthen and deepen the very ideas and conceptions which the Revolution had come to destroy. It supported and encouraged all the worst antisocial qualities and systematically destroyed the already awakened conception of the new revolutionary values

Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later. . . . Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.

Autonomous state actions will regularly take forms that attempt to reinforce the authority, political longevity, and social control of the state.

To renounce the conquest of power is voluntarily to leave the power with those who wield it, the exploiters. The essence of every revolution consisted and consists in putting a new class in power, thus enabling it to realize its own program in life. It is impossible to wage war and to reject victory.

When you think of power, you think the state has power. When you look at it in terms of revolution, in terms of the state, you think of it in terms of Russia, the Soviet Union, and how those who struggled for power actually became victims of the state, prisoners of the state, and how that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We have to think of revolution much more in terms of transitions from one epoch to another.

Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.

Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power.

Louis XIV was very frank and sincere when he said: I am the State. The modern statist is modest. He says: I am the servant of the State; but, he implies, the State is God. You could revolt against a Bourbon king, and the French did it. This was, of course, a struggle of man against man. But you cannot revolt against the god State and against his humble handy man, the bureaucrat.

I make no apologies that the PAP is the Government and the Government is the PAP.

Those who disagree with the dictator's plan have no other means to carry on than to defeat the despot by force of arms.

Government is the greatest combination for forces known to human society. It can command more men and raise more money than any and all other agencies combined.

Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.

Being a president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or he is swallowed.

The state itself becomes more and more identified with the interests of those who run things than with the interests of the people in general.

The present struggle seems less about abolishing big government than about who gets to use it.

How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?

At least on the domestic side of things that you're seeing, [Mike] Pence has that influence big time. But when it comes with what political fights to have?

In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.

It is sometimes easier to form a party than to attain by degrees the head of a party already formed.