Sections (TOC) :
• 1
16 Words; 118 Characters
• 2
19 Words; 115 Characters
• 3
26 Words; 145 Characters
• 4
25 Words; 155 Characters
• 5
45 Words; 292 Characters
• 6
44 Words; 248 Characters
• 7
57 Words; 346 Characters
• 8
20 Words; 98 Characters
• 9
77 Words; 410 Characters
• 10
126 Words; 735 Characters
• 11
67 Words; 385 Characters
• 12
42 Words; 208 Characters
• 13
80 Words; 477 Characters
• 14
27 Words; 145 Characters
• 15
45 Words; 270 Characters
• 16
49 Words; 325 Characters
• 17
35 Words; 235 Characters
• 18
59 Words; 393 Characters
• 19
29 Words; 174 Characters
• 20
44 Words; 256 Characters
• 21
10 Words; 57 Characters
• 22
112 Words; 766 Characters
• 23
14 Words; 90 Characters
• 24
20 Words; 116 Characters
• 25
25 Words; 164 Characters
• 26
25 Words; 172 Characters
• 27
96 Words; 557 Characters
• 28
30 Words; 195 Characters
• 29
136 Words; 773 Characters
• 30
163 Words; 865 Characters
• 31
212 Words; 1,281 Characters
• 32
144 Words; 766 Characters
• 33
56 Words; 324 Characters
• 34
35 Words; 216 Characters
• 35
26 Words; 138 Characters
• 36
22 Words; 135 Characters
• 37
119 Words; 635 Characters
Sections (Content) :
• 1
Only the shortsighted or the stupid can describe as "cooperation" that which is painful, unfortunate slavery.
• 2
Men enslaved are more voluptuous, more debauched, and more cruel than those who are in a state of freedom.
• 3
There never has been and there never can be a large organization in which all decisions, small as well as large, are made at the center.
• 4
...there is no such thing as good government, because its very existence is based upon the submission of one class to the dictatorship of another.
• 5
When the mass of people were theistically minded and when they were indifferent to the affairs of the government on account of their other-worldly outlook, the institution of a government did enthralled and exploit people instead of helping them in the regulation of social behavior.
• 6
Aggression, in the form of subjugating or killing other men and taking their women and food, has had definite survival advantages up to the present time. But now it could destroy the entire human race and much of the rest of life on Earth.
• 7
Mankind are, in all ages, caught by the same baits: The same tricks, played over and over again, still trepan [catch] them. The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny; flattery to treachery; standing armies to arbitrary government; and the glory of God to the temporal interest of the clergy.
• 8
It never has been and it never will be safe to let a few control the affairs of the many.
• 9
It is hard for you and for me, at this day, to understand how thoroughly it had been ingrained in the brain of almost every man that the king had some wonderful right over him that in some strange way the king owned him; that in some miraculous manner he belonged, body and soul, to somebody who rode on a horse -- to somebody with epaulets on his shoulders and a tinsel crown upon his brainless head.
• 10
The Confucian literati say: "Heaven gave birth to the people and then set rulers over them." But how can High Heaven have said this in so many words? Is it not rather that interested parties make this their pretext? The fact is that the strong oppressed the weak and the weak submitted to them; the cunning tricked the innocent and the innocent served them. It was because there was submission that the relation of lord and subject arose, and because there was servitude that the people, being powerless, could be kept under control. Thus servitude and mastery result from the struggle between the strong and the weak and the contrast between the cunning and the innocent, and Blue Heaven has nothing whatsoever to do with it.
• 11
Once the democratic concept of a government belonging to the people is displaced by a State or State-idol to whom the people belong, through blind faith or obedience, and the State alone decides what is right and what is wrong, human life inevitably becomes cheap. If a people have no regard for their own rights, it follows that they have no respect for the rights of others.
• 12
"You can't ask why. Because if you do we can beat you, and you have to just take it, and nobody will help you. Because we can kick you in the balls and you can't kick back. Because you are not free."
• 13
Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, George III his Washington, and the money-power may profit by their example. Divine rights have been succeeded by vested rights which look on government as a kind of cow which no one has the right to milk but themselves. As long as it fills their pails with special privileges, land grants, contracts, railroad charters, tax bounties, we hear nothing about the old saw that that government is the best which governs least.
• 14
...I have no reason to suppose that he who would take away my liberty would not, when he had me in his power, take away everything else.
• 15
...any State, whether bourgeois or proletarian, tends, by its very nature, simply to exploit and oppress man, to destroy in each and every one of us all the natural qualities of the human spirit that strive for equality and for the solidarity that underpins it.
• 16
Government is the consequence of the spirit of domination and violence with which some men have imposed themselves on other, and is at the same time the creature as well as the creator of privilege and its natural defender.
["Anarchist Propaganda," by Errico Malatesta, from "Malatesta: Life and Ideas."]
• 17
...government is in its nature a means of exploitation, and that its position doom it to be the defense of a dominant class, thus confirming and increasing the evils of domination.
["Anarchy," by Errico Malatesta.]
• 18
For us violence is only of use and can only be of use in driving back violence. Otherwise, when it is used to accomplish positive goals, either it fails completely, or it succeeds in establishing the oppression and the exploitation of the ones over the others.
["Revolution in Practice," by Errico Malatesta, from Umanità Nova, n. 191, October 7, 1922. Section 2.]
• 19
This alliance, known as the Popular Front, is in essential an alliance of enemies, and it seems probable that it must always end by one partner swallowing the other.
• 20
...looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.
• 21
...man is not free from the power of a superior.
• 22
Centralism, that artificial scheme which operates from the top towards the bottom and turns over the affairs of administration to a small minority, is always attended by barren official routine; it crushes individual conviction, kills all personal initiative by lifeless discipline and bureaucratic ossification. For the state, centralism is the appropriate form of organization, since it aims at the greatest possible uniformity of social life for the maintenance of political and social equilibrium. But for a movement whose very existence depends on prompt action at any favorable moment and on the independent thought of its supporters, centralism is a curse which weakens its power of decision and systematically represses every spontaneous initiative.
• 23
...slavery...is contrary to nature, and cannot be authorized by any right or law.
• 24
Let us then admit that force does not create right, and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers.
• 25
A people that would never misuse governmental powers would never misuse independence; a people that would always govern well would not need to be governed.
• 26
...when the government turns into an overlord, refusing to accept the people's control and turning into an alien force, this is alienation, alienation in politics.
• 27
We are living in an age which still permits great wealth and abject poverty to exist side by side; we still hang and flog; we still wage wars, and honor in every way the trade of soldiering; we still ill-treat, hunt, cage, eat, and even vivisect, sentient beings closely akin to ourselves; and we still maintain a religion which does not attempt to teach us how savage these practices are. In spite of scientific discoveries and our boast of high "civilization," many of our doings deserve rather to be classed with the primeval -- the prehistoric.
• 28
The victor becomes the lord, the vanquished one the subject: the former exercises supremacy and "rights of supremacy," the latter fulfills in awe and deference the "duties of a subject."
• 29
What is the meaning of the doctrine that we all enjoy "equality of political rights"? Only this -- that the state has no regard for my person, that to it I, like every other, am only a man, without having another significance that commands its deference. I do not command its deference as an aristocrat, a nobleman's son, or even as heir of an official whose office belongs to me by inheritance (as in the Middle Ages countships, etc., and later under absolute royalty, where hereditary offices occur). Now the state has an innumerable multitude of rights to give away; the right to lead a battalion, a company, etc.; the right to lecture at a university, and so forth; it has them to give away because they are its own, namely, state rights or "political" rights.
• 30
Through the state nothing in common comes to pass either, as little as one can call a piece of cloth the common work of all the individual parts of a machine; it is rather the work of the whole machine as a unit, machine work. In the same style everything is done by the state machine too; for it moves the clockwork of the individual minds, none of which follow their own impulse. The state seeks to hinder every free activity by its censorship, its supervision, its police, and holds this hindering to be its duty, because it is in truth a duty of self-preservation. The state wants to make something out of man, therefore there live in it only made men; every one who wants to be his own self is its opponent and is nothing. "He is nothing" means as much as, the state does not make use of him, grants him no position, no office, no trade, and the like.
• 31
The society leaves it to the individual's decision whether he will draw upon himself evil consequences and inconveniences by his mode of action, and hereby recognizes his free decision; the state behaves in exactly the reverse way, denying all right to the individual's decision and, instead, ascribing the sole right to its own decision, the law of the state, so that he who transgresses the state's commandment is looked upon as if he were acting against God's commandment -- a view which likewise was once maintained by the Church. Here God is the Holy in and of himself, and the commandments of the Church, as of the state, are the commandments of this Holy One, which he transmits to the world through his anointed and Lords-by-the-Grace-of-God. If the Church had deadly sins, the state has capital crimes; if the one had heretics, the other has traitors; the one ecclesiastical penalties, the other criminal penalties; the one inquisitorial processes, the other fiscal; in short, there sins, here crimes, there inquisition and here - inquisition. Will the sanctity of the state not fall like the Church's? The awe of its laws, the reverence for its highness, the humility of its "subjects," will this remain? Will the "saint's" face not be stripped of its adornment?
• 32
Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defenses only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free. We tax ourselves unjustly. There is a part of us which is not represented. It is taxation without representation. We quarter troops, we quarter fools and cattle of all sorts upon ourselves. We quarter our gross bodies on our poor souls, till the former eat up all the latter's substance.
• 33
The reason for the astonishing fact that a majority of working people submit to a handful of idlers who control their labor and their very lives is always and everywhere the same -- whether the oppressors and oppressed are of one race or whether, as in India and elsewhere, the oppressors are of a different nation.
• 34
The Government, in the widest sense, including capitalists and the Press, is nothing else than an organization which places the greater part of the people in the power of a smaller part, who dominate them...
• 35
The sages of government do not act from any wish to be benevolent; they deal with the people as the dogs of grass are dealt with.
• 36
The playing field is not level. There are commanding heights of economic and political power and a lowland plain for the poor.
• 37
The potter says, "I'm good at handling clay! To round it, I apply the compass; to square it, I apply the T square." The carpenter says, "I'm good at handling wood! To arc it, I apply the curve; to make it straight, I apply the plumb line." But as far as inborn nature is concerned, the clay and the wood surely have no wish to be subjected to compass and square, curve and plumb line. Yet generation after generation sings out in praise, saying, "Po Lo is good at handling horses! The potter and the carpenter are good at handling clay and wood!" And the same fault is committed by the men who handle the affairs of the world!
Chronology :
April 09, 2020 : Domination -- Added.
HTML file generated from :
http://RevoltSource.com/