Quotes By Emma Goldman

I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.

If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.

Free love? as if love is anything but free. Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love.

The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings as in his native land.

One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; the extreme thing is generally the true thing.

Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.

Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.

Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.

When we can't dream any longer we die.

All claims of education notwithstanding, the pupil will accept only that which his mind craves.

Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be.

Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.

The most violent element in society is ignorance.

On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.

Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.

Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested - for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day.

Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony.

The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.

No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution... revolution is but thought carried into action.

Direct action is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.

No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.

To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.

Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.

The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved.

Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.

Morality and its victim, the mother - what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?

The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being.