"The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters." - Antonio Gramsci
"The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening." - Rosa Luxemburg
Table of Contents
Anti-Authoritarianism
- "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." - Albert Camus
- "Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is humanity's original virtue." - Oscar Wilde
- "I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees." - Euripides
- Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and seeks to abolish unnecessary coercion and hierarchy such as the state (government) and capitalism. The term is used interchangeably with anti-authoritarianism.
- "Those who say therefore that the anarchists have badly chosen their name because it is wrongly interpreted by the masses and lends itself to wrong interpretations, are mistaken. The error does not come from the word but from the thing; and the difficulties anarchists face in their propaganda do not depend on the name they have taken, but on the fact that their concept clashes with all the public’s long established prejudices on the function of government, or the State as it is also called." - Errico Malatesta
- "The son of darkness sees nothing when he comes out into the light, just like when he was groping around in the dark. Joy blinds him. It kills him. So he says it is a hallucination and condemns it." - Alfredo Bonanno
- "Many commentators dismiss anarchism as utopian, formless, primitive, or otherwise incompatible with the realities of a complex society. One might, however, argue rather differently: that at every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that contribute to — rather than alleviate — material and cultural deficit." - Noam Chomsky
- "We are anarcho-syndicalists on the shop floor, green anarchists in the woods, social anarchists in our communities, individualists when you catch us alone, anarcho-communists when there’s something to share, insurrectionists when we strike a blow." - Anonymous
- "Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral senses of the people who were oppressing them." - Assata Shakur
- "Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves." - Herbert Marcuse
- "Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities -- the political, the religious, the educational authorities --- who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing -- forming in our minds -- their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself." - Timothy Leary
- "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." - Plato
- "Government has always been the creator and defender of privilege; the organization of oppression and revenge." - Voltairine de Cleyre
- "The attorney's first duty is to the courts and the public, not to the client, and wherever the duties to his client conflict with those he owes as an officer of the court in the administration of justice, the former must yield to the latter." - Corpus Juris Secundum
- In 1817 Thomas Jefferson lamented that in drafting statutes his fellow lawyers were accustomed to “making every other word a ‘said’ or ‘aforesaid,’ and saying everything over two or three times, so that nobody but we of the craft can untwist the diction, and find out what it means…” - Plain English for Lawyers
- “The rights of the individual are not derived from governmental agencies, either municipal, state, federal, or even from the Constitution, but they exist inherently in every man, and are merely reaffirmed in the Constitution and restricted only to the extent they have been voluntarily surrendered by the citizenship to the agencies of government." - City of Dallas v Mitchell, 245 S.W. 944
- "To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue. ... To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
- "We can't even begin to count the number of times Judges, Lawyers and statesmen have said: "There isn't any common law anymore. It has been replaced by statutes." They would be more truthful if they said: "It has been replaced by martial law." - Supreme Court Judge A.H. Ellett
- "It is not the duty of the police to protect you. Their job is to protect the corporation and arrest code breakers." - Sapp vs. Tallahassee, 348 80
- "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" - Michel Foucault
- "We are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844
- "School is established, not in order that it should be convenient for the children to study, but that the teachers should be able to teach in comfort. The children's conversation, motion, and merriment … are not convenient for the teacher, and so in the schools, which are built on the plan of prisons, questions, conversation, and motion are prohibited." - Leo Tolstoy, 1862
- "Landlords’ right has its origin in robbery. The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth." - Adam Smith
- "The strains and stresses suffered by the individual in society are grounded in the normal functioning of that society (and of the individual!) rather than in its disturbances and diseases." - Herbert Marcuse
- "You have two choices: start thinking the way God and your society want you to think or be forsaken by all. The decision is yours, since you are a free agent who can choose to rejoin the world of fabricated reality—civilization, that is—or stubbornly insist on . . . what? That we should rethink how the whole world transacts its business? ... Try to be realistic. We live in a country we love and that loves us back. We have families and friends and jobs that make it all worthwhile. We are somebodies, as we spin upon this good earth, not a bunch of nobodies without names or numbers or retirement plans. None of this is going to become unraveled by a thought criminal who contends that the world is not double plus good and never will be and who believes that anyone is better off dead than alive. Our lives may not be unflawed—that would deny us a future to work toward—but if this charade is good enough for us, then it should be good enough for you. So if you cannot get your mind right, try walking away. You will find no place to go and no one who will have you. ... Love it or leave it—choose which and choose fast. You will never get us to give up our hopes, demented as they may seem. You will never get us to wake up from our dreams." - Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
- The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
- "It is only thus that we can explain that terrible tension with which the men of our time incline to intoxicate themselves with wine, tobacco, opium, cards, the reading of newspapers, travelling, all kinds of spectacles, and amusements. All these things are done like serious, important affairs. They are indeed important affairs. If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one’s reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state. All men of our time live in a constant crying contradiction between consciousness and life." - Leo Tolstoy
- "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
- "Every nation-state tends towards the imperial - that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. Still it should be said of the political left, we expect something better. And correctly. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion, who denounce the hideous social arrangements that make war inevitable and human desire omnipresent; which fosters corporate selfishness, panders to appetites and disorder, waste the earth." - Daniel Berrigan
- "So, when these gentlemen say, ‘You are utopians, you anarchists are dreamers, your utopia would never work’, we must reply, ‘Yes, it’s true, anarchism is a tension, not a realisation, not a concrete attempt to bring about anarchy tomorrow morning’. But we must also be able to say but you, distinguished democratic gentlemen in government that regulate our lives, that think you can get into our heads, our brains, that govern us through the opinions that you form daily in your newspapers, in the universities, schools, etc., what have you gentlemen accomplished? A world worth living in? Or a world of death, a world in which life is a flat affair, devoid of any quality, without any meaning to it? A world where one reaches a certain age, is about to get one’s pension, and asks oneself, ‘But what have I done with my life? What has been the sense of living all these years?’" - Alfredo M. Bonanno, The Anarchist Tension
- “Anarchism is just the way people act when they are free to do as they choose, and when they deal with others who are equally free — and therefore aware of the responsibility to others that entails.” - David Graeber
- "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
- "Don't be afraid, don't resist, don't delay. Be what you are. There is nothing to be afraid of. Trust and try. Experiment honestly. Give your real being a chance to shape your life. You will not regret." - Sri Nisargadatta Mahara, I Am That
- "Anarchism, to me, means not only the denial of authority or the economic system, but a revision of the principles of morality. It means the development of the individual as well as the assertion of the individual. It means self-responsibility, and not leader worship." - Voltairine De Cleyre
- "I think there is no better sign of our time than the fact that mankind portrays itself as being so worthy of respect. It is a proof that the aura surrounding the oppressors and the gods of this earth is fading." - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 2
- "To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt" - Mikhail Bakunin
- "So I decided to become a midwife… I wanted to deliver a thousand babies. And as each one arrives, especially the little girls, I’ll be there first to whisper into her tender little ear: REBEL! REBEL!” - Emma Goldman
- "These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard" - Martin Luther King Jr.
- "No one in a productive society wants you to know there are ways of looking at the world other than their ways..." - Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
- "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum...." - Noam Chomsky, The Common Good
- "We can't have education without revolution. We have tried peace education for 1,900 years and it has failed. Let us try revolution and see what it will do now." - Helen Keller
- "Sometimes I dream of this social change. I get a streak of faith in Evolution, and the good in man. I paint a gradual slipping out of the now, to that beautiful then, where there are neither kings, presidents, landlords, national bankers, stockbrokers, railroad magnates, patentright monopolists, or tax and title collectors; where there are no over-stocked markets or hungry children, idle counters and naked creatures, splendor and misery, waste and need. I am told this is farfetched idealism, to paint this happy, povertyless, crimeless, diseaseless world; I have been told I “ought to be behind the bars” for it. Remarks of that kind rather destroy the white streak of faith. I lose confidence in the slipping process, and am forced to believe that the rulers of the earth are sowing a fearful wind, to reap a most terrible whirlwind. When I look at this poor, bleeding, wounded World, this world that has suffered so long, struggled so much, been scourged so fiercely, thorn-pierced so deeply, crucified so cruelly, I can only shake my head and remember: The giant is blind, but he’s thinking: and his locks are growing, fast." - Voltairine de Cleyre
- "I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice." - Theodore Parker, abolitionist
- "Hanged in Chicago, beheaded in Germany, garroted in Xerez, shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Montbrison and in Paris, our dead are many; but you have not been able to destroy anarchy. Its roots go deep: its spouts from the bosom of a rotten society that is falling apart; it is a violent backlash against the established order; it stands for the aspirations to equality and liberty which have entered the lists against the current authoritarianism. It is everywhere. That is what makes it indomitable..." - Émile Henry
- "We are all responsible for our dream of storming the heavens. We cannot turn ourselves into dwarves now, after having dreamed, elbow to elbow, each feeling the others' heartbeats, of attacking and overthrowing the gods. This is the dream that makes power afraid." - Alfredo M. Bonanno
Labour Exploitation
- "Work makes a mockery of freedom." - Bob Black
- "People don’t need any convincing to hate their jobs—their jobs do that for them. Like hating the police, hating your job is one of the most beautiful and natural things you can do, which is why popular culture works so hard to convince us that cops are heroes and that jobs are actually good." - Kassandra Vee
- "The reign of capital, which denies our very existence as human beings and reduces us to ‘things’, seems very serious, methodical and disciplined. But its possessive paroxysm, its ethical rigour, its obsession with ‘doing’ all hide a great illusion: the total emptiness of the commodity spectacle, the uselessness of indefinite accumulation and the absurdity of exploitation. So the great seriousness of the world of work and productivity hides a total lack of seriousness ... Many things can be done ‘playfully’ yet most of the things we do, we do very ‘seriously’ wearing the death mask we have borrowed from capital." - Alfredo M. Bonanno
- "Work has not only become the center of every concern, but confident in its independence, it also imposes its measure on free time, amusement, encounters and reflection. In short, it is presented as the measure of life itself." - Massimo Passamani
- "These people cannot comprehend that it would be possible to not produce any surplus value, and that one could also refuse to do so. That it is possible to assert one’s will to not produce, so struggle against both the bosses’ economic structures and the ideological ones that permeate the whole of Western thought." - Alfredo M. Bonanno
- "They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price." - Khalil Gibran
- "What madness the love of work is! With great scenic skill capital has succeeded in making the exploited love exploitation, the hanged man the rope and the slave his chains." - Alfredo M. Bonanno
- "Like Christ, the doleful personification of ancient slavery, the men, the women and the children of the proletariat have been climbing painfully for a century up the hard Calvary of pain; for a century compulsory toil has broken their bones, bruised their flesh, tortured their nerves; for a century hunger has torn their entrails and their brains. O Laziness, have pity on our long misery! O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish!" - Paul Lafargue, The Right To Be Lazy
- "If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves." - Lane Kirkland
- "In the illusory world of commodities, play is also an illusion. We imagine we are playing, while all we are really doing is monotonously repeating the roles assigned to us by capital." - Alfredo M. Bonanno
- "You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education." - Bob Black, The Abolition of Work
- "If I am right, that the story of the Western world is one of increasing left hemisphere domination, we would not expect insight to be the key note. Instead, we would expect a sort of insouciant optimism, the sleepwalker whistling a happy tune as he ambles towards the abyss." - Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary
- “There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution” - Aldous Huxley
- "The tolerance that we, the people, have for submitting ourselves to a life of toil gives one a sense of why the rulers of this world have such contempt for us and enact their villainies whenever the mood strikes them... Their game is to pretend to serve us, but we are the servants and they are the masters. ... (Many) are convinced that they are part of a greater cause than any to which they could aspire on their own. They will argue for it, they will kill for it, and they will die for it. ... They will never be allowed or allow themselves to understand the real workings of the system. ... What vow of silence keeps (parents) from informing their offspring that they have been sentenced to suffer years of regimented schooling and a lifetime of work and worry before they will be allowed to rest a bit, with any luck, in the latter years of their term on this pretty blue planet?" - Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
- “Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
- "When employees contract out their labour power as property in the person to employers, what is really happening is that employees are selling their own self determination, their own wills, their own freedom. In short, they are, during their hours of employment, slaves." - L. Susan Brown
- "There has never been a free people, a civilized nation, a real republic on this earth. Human society has always consisted of masters and slaves, and the slaves have always been and are today, the foundation stones of the social fabric. Wage-labor is but a name; wage-slavery is the fact." - Eugene Debs
- "The neutralisation of the individual is a constant practice in capital’s reified totality. The flattening of opinions is a therapeutic process, a death machine. Production cannot take place without this flattening in the spectacular form of capitalism." - Alfredo M. Bonanno
- "The tyrant, who in order to hold his power, suppresses every superiority, does away with good men, forbids education and light, controls every movement of the citizens and, keeping them under a perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in the meetings, and spreads dissension and calumny among the citizens and impoverishes them, is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied and impose on them permanent need of a chief." - Aristotle
- "Man, like all living beings, adapts and accustoms himself to the conditions under which he lives, and passes on acquired habits. Thus, having being born and bred in bondage, when the descendants of a long line of slaves started to think, they believed that slavery was an essential condition of life, and freedom seemed impossible to them. Similarly, workers who for centuries were obliged, and therefore accustomed, to depend for work, that is bread, on the goodwill of the master, and to see their lives always at the mercy of the owners of the land and of capital, ended by believing that it is the master who feeds them, and ingenuously ask one how would it be possible to live if there were no masters." - Errico Malatesta
- "The answer clearly isn't economic: it's moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the '60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them." - David Graeber
- "The masters of the world certainly do not want humanity to be able to be happy, because a happy humanity would not let itself be caught up in productivity, in the discipline over work or in hypermarkets." - Franco Bifo Berardi
- "Aristotle’s dream is our reality. Our machines, with breath of fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness, wonderful inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred labor. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of capitalism remains dominated by the prejudice of the wage system, worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty." - Paul Lafargue, The Right To Be Lazy
- "We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." - Buckminster Fuller
- "During much of the twentieth century, social thinkers worried about technology becoming so efficient that human beings would be freed from devoting the plurality of their time to labor, which includes those hours spent preparing for labor and recovering from labor, leaving workers with a surplus of leisure and not enough distractions to fill their days. Attuned to auguries of a palmy future, these observers had qualms that this boom of idleness would trigger an existential meltdown, one characterized by the perturbations of those who were unused to contending with a surfeit of uncommitted hours. As usual, the predicted apocalypse did not arrive. Workers never quaked in horror before leisure’s abyss or recoiled at the thought of having too much time on their hands. Theoretically, a life of leisure for all is possible. But the Few will always want to procure more and more wealth and power. And for this they need workers willing to spend the plurality of their time working." - Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
- "In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it." - David Graeber
- "You need at this time especially to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder. You need to know that you were not created to work and produce and impoverish yourself to enrich an idle exploiter. You need to know that you have a mind to improve, a soul to develop, and a manhood to sustain." - Eugene V. Debs
- We live in a kingdom of bullshit, a kingdom you've lived in for far too long. - Sam Esmail
- "The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system." - Arthur C. Clarke
- "The bottom line is simple: all of us deserve to make the most of our potential as we see fit, to be the masters of our own destinies. Being forced to sell these things away to survive is tragic and humiliating. We don’t have to live like this." - CrimethInc.
- "We can live in a society with no bosses, masters, politicians, or bureaucrats; a society with no judges, no police, and no criminals, no rich or poor; a society free of sexism, homophobia, and transphobia; a society in which the wounds from centuries of enslavement, colonialism, and genocide are finally allowed to heal. The only things stopping us are the prisons, programming, and paychecks of the powerful, as well as our own lack of faith in ourselves." - Anarchy Works, Peter Gelderloos
Market Abolitionism
- "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." - Martin Luther King Jr.
- "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - Edward Abbey
- "Capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evil." - Albert Einstein
- Market Abolitionism is the belief that the economic market should be completely eliminated from society. Market abolitionists argue that markets are ethically abhorrent, antisocial and fundamentally incompatible with long term human and environmental survival.
- "We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor - both black and white, here and abroad." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
- "The cheapest commodity on earth today is human flesh and blood. To make a profit at the expense of human life is the central controlling motive of the capitalist system." - Eugene V. Debs
- "To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth." - Murray Bookchin
- "Confronted with this double madness of the laborers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs." - Paul Lafargue, The Right To Be Lazy
- "Show me a capitalist and I'll show you a bloodsucker." - Malcolm X
- "What crime is it to rob a bank compared to founding one?" - Lucio Urtubia
- "The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspires men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life." - Martin Luther King Jr.
- "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words" - Ursula K. Le Guin
- "Let me remind everyone of some basic truths of all economic systems. They all are born usually out of another system. They evolve and change over time, and then they die / 2, giving birth to the next system. Slavery, born, evolves, dies. Feudalism, born, evolves, dies. Capitalism, born, evolves... that's right. The next phase is the passing away." - Richard Wolff, Economics Professor / 2 / 3
- "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind." - Karl Marx
- "We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition" - William James
- "Money is the alienated essence of man's work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it." - Karl Marx
- "Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization." - Eugene V. Debs
- "If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of separation?" - Karl Marx
- "Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money". - Peter Joseph
- "There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside." - Upton Sinclair
- "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." - Charles G. Binderup, Representative of Nebraska (paraphrasing Henry Ford)
- “It is a serious question how they (people) would regard the system under which they live, if they once knew what the initiated can do with it.”- Henry Ford, My Life and Work
- "I was warned off when I got into this – don’t do this unless you can put your conscience one hundred percent in the freezer. I heard myself laugh at it back then, but it wasn’t a joke at all." - Ronald Bernard, Elite Dutch Banker
- "And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." - President Thomas Jefferson
- “Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.” - President James A. Garfield
- “The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole… Their secret is that they have annexed from governments, monarchies, and republics the power to create the world’s money…” - Prof. Carroll Quigley
- "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." - Mayer Amschel Rothschild
- "Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens." - Derrick Jensen
- "There is no more room for illusion as to the function of modern, armies. They are permanently maintained only to suppress the “enemy within”. Thus the forts of Paris and Lyons have not been built to defend the city against the foreigner, but to crush it in case of revolt." - Paul Lafargue, The Right To Be Lazy
- "Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it." - President Woodrow Wilson
- “The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.” - President Franklin D. Roosevelt
- “Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States.” - Sen. Barry Goldwater
- The IRS is not a US government agency. It is an agency of the IMF, which is an agency of the United Nations. - Black Law's Dictionary 6th Ed. pg 816.
- “In the United States today, we have two governments. We have the duly constituted government and then we have the independent, uncontrolled and uncoordinated government in the Federal Reserve System operating the money powers which are reserved for Congress by the Constitution.” - Rep. Wright Patman
- “We have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks. Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are U.S. Government institutions. They are not government institutions. They are private credit monopolies; domestic swindlers, rich and predatory money lenders which prey upon the people of the United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers. The Federal Reserve Banks are the agents of the foreign central banks. The truth is the Federal Reserve Board has usurped the Government of the United States by the arrogant credit monopoly which operates the Federal Reserve Board.” - Congressman Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the House Banking & Currency Committee
- "A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men ... We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men." - U.S. President Woodrow Wilson
- “This Act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth…When the President signs this Act, the invisible government by the money power, proven to exist by the Money Trust Investigation, will be legalized…The new law will create inflation whenever the trust wants inflation…From now on, depressions will be scientifically created.” - Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, on creation of Federal Reserve, 1913
- "Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take away from them the power to create money and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money." - Sir Josiah Stamp, Director of the Bank of England (Said to be from an informal talk at the University of Texas in the 1920s, but as yet unverified.)
- "I do not like money, money is the reason we fight." - Karl Marx
- "While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." - Eugene Debs
- "When a woman deprives herself of her last piece of bread to give it up to the first comer, when she takes off her own scanty rags to cover another woman who is cold, while she herself shivers on the deck of a vessel, she does so because she would suffer infinitely more in seeing a hungry man, or woman starved with cold, than in shivering or feeling hungry herself." - Peter Kropotkin
- "They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible..." - Oscar Wilde
- Anarcho-communism is a political philosophy and anarchist school of thought which advocates the abolition of the state, capitalism, wage labour, social hierarchies and private property.
- A communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption and is classless, stateless, and moneyless, implying the end of the exploitation of labour.
- "In this world there’s room for everyone and the good earth is rich, and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much, and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities life will be violent, and all will be lost." - Charlie Chaplin
- "One must feel intensely the indignity of our social wrongs; one’s very being must throb with the pain, the sorrow, the despair millions of people are daily made to endure. Indeed, unless we have become a part of humanity, we cannot even faintly understand the just indignation that accumulates in a human soul, the burning, surging passion that makes the storm inevitable." - Emma Goldman
- "The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth" - African Proverb
- "My neighbor is not my enemy, but my friend, and I am his, if we would but mutually recognize the fact. We help each other to a better, fuller, happier living; and this service might be greatly increased if we would cease to restrict, hamper, and oppress each other. ‘Why can we not agree to let each live his own life, neither of us transgressing the limit that separates our individualities?" - Benjamin Tucker
- "Personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution." - Carol Hanisch
- "The bourgeois individual is not a man, but a trading company. We want to destroy all trading companies. We want to abolish the double economy in order to found a new one that is one single unit, which history already knew during the times when the cave man went to collect as many coconuts as there were comrades in his cave, with his hands as his only tools." - Amadeo Bordiga
- "There shall be no buying and selling ... If any man or family want grain or other provisions, they may go to the storehouse and fetch without money." - Gerrard Winstantley, 1652
- "With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." - Oscar Wilde
- "When we are in partnership and have stopped clutching each other's throats, when we have stopped enslaving each other, we will stand together, hands clasped, and be friends. We will be comrades, and we will begin the march to the grandest civilization the human race has ever known." - Eugene V. Debs