Anarchists Quotes

“An anarchist is someone who doesn't need a cop to make him behave.”
― Ammon Hennacy

“You mean people don't like to see hypocrisy in their leadership? Shocking.”
― Marissa Meyer, Renegades

“...the presence of others has become even more intolerable to me, their conversation most of all. Oh, how it all annoys and exasperates me: their attitudes, their manners, their whole way of being! The people of my world, all my unhappy peers, have come to irritate, oppress and sadden me with their noisy and empty chatter, their monstrous and boundless vanity, their even more monstrous egotism, their club gossip... the endless repetition of opinions already formed and judgments already made; the automatic vomiting forth of articles read in those morning papers which are the recognised outlet of the hopeless wilderness of their ideas; the eternal daily meal of overfamiliar cliches concerning racing stables and the stalls of fillies of the human variety... the hutches of the 'petites femmes' - another worn out phrase in the dirty usury of shapeless expression!

Oh my contemporaries, my dear contemporaries...

Their idiotic self-satisfaction; their fat and full-blown self-sufficiency: the stupid display of their good fortune; the clink of fifty- and a hundred-franc coins forever sounding out their financial prowess, according their own reckoning; their hen-like clucking and their pig-like grunting, as they pronounce the names of certain women; the obesity of their minds, the obscenity of their eyes, and the toneless-ness of their laughter! They are, in truth, handsome puppets of amour, with all the exhausted despondency of their gestures and the slackness of their chic...

Chic! A hideous word, which fits their manner like a new glove: as dejected as undertakers' mutes, as full-blown as Falstaff...

Oh my contemporaries: the ceusses of my circle, to put it in their own ignoble argot. They have all welcomed the moneylenders into their homes, and have been recruited as their clients, and they have likewise played host to the fat journalists who milk their conversations for the society columns. How I hate them; how I execrate them; how I would love to devour them liver and lights - and how well I understand the Anarchists and their bombs!”
― Jean Lorrain, Monsieur de Phocas

“Residents of the squatter community of Christiana, Denmark, for example, have a Christmastide ritual where they dress in Santa suits, take toys from department stores and distribute them to children on the street, partly just so everyone can relish the images of the cops beating down Santa and snatching the toys back from crying children.”
― David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

“The villains’ poor life choices weren’t exactly the bees’ fault, after all.”
― Marissa Meyer, Renegades

“Plantie is a very strong Protestant, that is to say, he's against all churches, especially the Protestant: and he thinks a lot of Buddha, Karma and Confucius. He is also a bit of an anarchist and three or four years ago he took up Einstein and vitamins.”
― Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth

“Unless a convention of anarchists visited the library yesterday, most books ought to be in their rightful places.”
― Evelyn Skye, The Crown's Game

“Naturally, therefore, these people talk about 'a happy time coming'; 'the paradise of the future'; 'mankind freed from the bondage of vice and the bondage of virtue', and so on. And so also the men of the inner circle speak — the sacred priesthood. They also speak to applauding crowds of the happiness of the future, and of mankind freed at last. But in their mouths" — and the policeman lowered his voice — "in their mouths these happy phrases have a horrible meaning. They are under no illusions; they are too intellectual to think that man upon this earth can ever be quite free of original sin and the struggle. And they mean death. When they say that mankind shall be free at last, they mean that mankind shall commit suicide. When they talk of a paradise without right or wrong, they mean the grave. They have but two objects, to destroy first humanity and then themselves. That is why they throw bombs instead of firing pistols. The innocent rank and file are disappointed because the bomb has not killed the king; but the high-priesthood are happy because it has killed somebody.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“there may be thunder in Europe but it is in America the lightning will fall”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Fall of the Republic and Other Political Satires

“Everyone ate as a group, and a huge cauldron of dumpster-dived gruel bubbled over a campfire, tended by a grubby-handed group of chefs dicing potatoes and onions on a piece of cardboard on the ground. Huck [Finn] may have been right that a 'barrel of odds and ends' where the 'juice kind of swaps around' makes for better victuals, but it occurred to me that the revolution may well get dysentery.”
― Matthew Power, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009

“If your political theory requires humanity to "evolve", then you do not have a theory.”
― A.E. Samaan

“...an anarchist paper, stung by an attack in the Socialist Standard, recalled the SPGB having petty criminals and fraudsters, and a couple who ran a call-girl agency in its ranks.”
― Robert Barltrop

“Anarchy can only ever be a temporary state. As with other creatures on this planet, it is human nature to crave the security of creating hierarchical structures. Our major religions are based on the same concept. Even the Antichrist has an antithetical hierarchy in Hell.”
― Stewart Stafford

“The superannuated anarchist Kropotkin, made use of the war to disavow everything he had been teaching for almost half a century. This denouncer of the state supported the Entente, and if he denounced the dual power in Russia, it was not in the name of anarchy, but in the name of a single core of the bourgeoisie.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Anarchist advocacy of defensive organizations was born out of a historical recognition of the state as the most brutal and ruthless agent of terror, and the recognition that its use of violence depends almost entirely on the degree to which it feels challenged. Anarchists recognize that the state will do anything, no matter how vile, to maintain its own power.”
― Sam Mbah

“Independent of the state, these citadels put into practice something anarchists have been saying all along: no form of politics is worth our time until it helps struggling people get what they need, sustainability and reliably. All the better if you can do so without patriarchy and fundamentalism.”
― Nathan Schneider, Chomsky On Anarchism

“South of Larissa the landscape began to change. Jude watched an irrigation machine like a giant stick insect creeping over a field, and a tractor racing across another, raking up a dust cloud behind in a brown jet stream.”
― Paul Alkazraji, The Migrant

“The meeting was cordial, though, as Levoisier had guessed, he had fallen a few notches in the pecking order and he was treated as such. Letting their snobbish attitude go, he pressed on. “I suggest that you and I meet on the ground once we are settled,” he said to them. “Oh, really? Now why is that?” asked Aldrich. “I have some information I’m sure will interest you and your future plans.” Detrick was not in the best control of himself after their computer controlled fall through the thin atmosphere. “Of course we’ll meet you. We are staying at the Bradbury in the New Settlements. “Ambassador, I’m afraid they won’t let you stay there. Mr. Aldrich, yes, but not you.” Levoisier informed him. “What do you mean, won’t let me?! I’m the Ambassador from the United States!” barked Detrick. “I’m afraid he’s right, Conan, they won’t serve your type there. You’ll have to stay in the NASA dormitories.” Aldrich chuckled. “I’m sorry Ambassador, but I’m afraid you don’t understand the mood toward government employees on the Frontier,” said Levoisier. Detrick shouted, “I’m not a government employee, I’m the goddamned American Ambassador!” Malcolm Aldrich III looked at Detrick and said, “Conan, just look to see who signs your paycheck – I mean your official paycheck.”
― Michael James Scharen, Sol is Not Lost

“Gazing upon the child, the presence in the adult’s heart of an unfinished life, oscillating between birth and death, is clarified.”
― Raoul Vaneigem

“How many anarchists once they have read an anti-authoritarian account of some historical episode actually go and read accounts from other perspectives?”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“Then there was the libertarian or anarchist socialist, the proponent of self-management and mutual aid and the enemy of bureaucracy, party and state power.”
― Stuart Christie, My Granny Made Me an Anarchist. The Christie File: Part 1, 1946 - 1964

“Dalin will not get very far. Such types try to hoist a boulder that is much too heavy for them. They are crushed when it slides back. Moreover, they draw attention; often they fall victim to the first cleansings. They do not know the rules, they even scorn them. They are like people who deliberately drive on the wrong side of the road and want to be applauded for doing so. The anarch, in contrast, knows the rules. He has studied them as a historian and goes along with them as a contemporary. Wherever possible, he plays his own game within their framework; this makes the fewest waves. Thus, Dalin's liquidation would presumably be consistent with the system that he defied. But that is not the basis for my legitimation. One might erroneously assume that I take bloodshed lightly. Not by along shot! I simply stay free of moral judgments. Blood has its own laws; it is as untamable as the sea.”
― Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil

“Mulling it over that evening, I had to agree with him. Dalin embodied the anarchic nihilist, a type that is not all that rare. What was special about him was that he not only reacted with a general malaise, he also thought about it. Of course it made a difference whether he shot someone from the front or from the back—a difference not in the effect, but in the self-affirmation.

I have noticed that a cat will turn up her nose at a piece of meat if I hand it to her, but she will devour it with gusto if she has "stolen" it. The meat is the same, but the difference lies in the predator's delight in recognizing itself.

The anarchic nihilist is not to be confused with the socialist revolutionary. His aversion is not toward one person or another but toward order per se. Asocial and apolitical, he represents the destructive workings of nature. He would like to accelerate them. Compared with even the modest methods of our tyranny, Dalin seems like a kind of Don Quixote tilting at windmills. What was accomplished when a train derailed, a bridge exploded, a depart­ment store burned to the ground? True, one has to see this in different terms—say, as a paltry sacrifice to the delight of the powerful Shiva. A chemist seldom knows precisely what he is doing.”
― Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil