Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Peter Gelderloos
56 quotes
“Capitalists and their predecessors—slaveowners, moneylenders, merchant-investors—owe their very existence to the State. In early times, concentration of political and spiritual power precedes economic stratification in society.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation (2017), p. 7
“We believe that tactics should be chosen to fit the particular situation, not drawn from a preconceived moral code.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An anarchist is not someone who favors chaos but someone who favors the total liberation of the world through the abolition of capitalism, government, and all other forms of oppressive authority, to be replaced by any number of other social arrangements, proven or utopian.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If a movement is not a threat, it cannot change a system based on centralized coercion and violence, and if that movement does not realize and exercise the power that makes it a threat, it cannot destroy such a system.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Time and again, people struggling not for some token reform but for complete liberation — the reclamation of control over our own lives and the power to negotiate our own relationships with the people and world around us — will find that nonviolence does not work, that we face a self-perpetuating power structure that is immune to appeals to conscience and strong enough to plow over the disobedient and uncooperative.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nonviolence refuses to recognize that it can only work for privileged people, who have a status protected by violence, as the perpetrators and beneficiaries of a violent hierarchy.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The people most affected by a system of oppression should be at the forefront of the struggle against that particular oppression.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The imperative of nonviolence overrides the basic respect of trusting people to liberate themselves.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A stock argument common among pacifists is that revolutionaries should not use violence because the state will then use this to “justify” violent repression. Well, to whom is this violent repression justified, and why aren’t those who claim to be against violence trying to un-justify it? Why do nonviolent activists seek to change society’s morality in how it views oppression or war, but accept the morality of repression as natural and untouchable?”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By preaching nonviolence, and abandoning to state repression those who do not listen obediently, white activists who think they are concerned about racism are actually enacting a paternalistic relationship and fulfilling the useful role of pacifying the oppressed.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nonviolence in the hands of white people has been and continues to be a colonial enterprise. White elites instruct the natives in how to run their economies and governments, while white dissidents instruct the natives in how to run their resistance.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most white people have enough privilege and latitude that we may mistake these generously long, velvet-padded chains for freedom, so we comfortably agitate within the parameters of democratic society (the borders of which are composed of violently enforced racial, economic, sexual, and governmental structures). Some of us are further mistaken in assuming that all people face these same circumstances, and expect people of color to exercise privileges they don’t actually have.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we understand that privileged people derive material benefits from the exploitation of oppressed people, and that this means we benefit from the violence used to keep them down, we cannot sincerely condemn them for violently rebelling against the structural violence that privileges us.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The contradiction in ostensibly revolutionary pacifism is that revolution is never safe, but to the vast majority of its practitioners and advocates, pacifism is about staying safe, not getting hurt, not alienating anyone, not giving anyone a bitter pill to swallow.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At first, nonviolence seems like a clear moral position that has little to do with race. This view is based on the simplistic assumption that violence is first and foremost something that we choose. But which people in this world have the privilege to choose violence, and which people live in violent circumstances whether they want to or not? Generally, nonviolence is a privileged practice, one that comes out of the experiences of white people, and it does not always make sense for people without white privilege or for white people attempting to destroy the system of privilege and oppression.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Put quite plainly, nonviolence ensures a state monopoly on violence. States survive by assuming the role of the sole legitimate purveyor of violent force within their territory. Any struggle against oppression necessitates a conflict with the state.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How the state can count on knee-jerk pacifist condemnation of violence and how pacifists effectively do the state’s dirty work by failing to use their cultural influence to make militant resistance to tyranny “respectable.” Instead, pacifists claim that militancy alienates people, and do nothing to attempt to counteract this phenomenon.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In practice, pacifist morality demonstrates that it is more acceptable for radicals to rely on the violence of the government for protection than to defend themselves.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If pacifists are unable to defend their own gains, what will they do when they don’t have the organized violence of the police?”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Permitting nonviolent protest improves the image of the state. Whether they mean to or not, nonviolent dissidents play the role of a loyal opposition in a performance that dramatizes dissent and creates the illusion that democratic government is not elitist or authoritarian. Pacifists paint the state as benign by giving authority the chance to tolerate a criticism that does not actually threaten its continued operation.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Free speech does not empower us, and it does not equal freedom. Free speech is a privilege that can be — and is — taken away by the government when it serves their interests.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The state is not a passive thing. If it wants to repress a movement or organization, it does not wait for an excuse, it manufactures one.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pacifism goes hand in hand with efforts to centralize and control the movement. The concept is inherently authoritarian and incompatible with anarchism because it denies people the right to self-determination in directing their own struggles. The pacifist reliance on centralization and control (with a leadership that can take “vigorous efforts” to “prevent destructive behavior”) preserves the state within the movement, and preserves hierarchical structures to assist state negotiations (and state repression).”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The tendencies of pacifism toward negotiation and centralization facilitate efforts by the state to manipulate and co-opt rebellious social movements; they also make it easier for the state to repress a movement, if it decides there is a need to do so.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Modern governments, which have long studied methods of social control, no longer view peace as the default social condition, interrupted only by outside agitators. Now they understand that the natural condition of the world (the world they have created, I should editorialize) is conflict: rebellion to their rule is inevitable and continuous. Statecraft has become the art of managing conflict, permanently. As long as rebels continue to carry olive branches and a naive view of the struggle, the state knows that it is safe.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It seems that the only form of violence [pacifists] consistently oppose is rebellion against the state.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Instead of raising a fist, pacifists raise their index and middle fingers to form a V. That V stands for victory and is the symbol of patriots exulting in the peace that follows a triumphant war. In the final analysis, the peace that pacifists defend is that of the vanquishing army, the unopposed state that has conquered all resistance and monopolized violence to such an extent that violence need no longer be visible.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nonviolence assumes that instead of defending ourselves against violence, we can suffer violence patiently until enough of society can be mobilized to oppose it peacefully (or that we can expect to “transform” any aggression that threatens us individually). Most proponents of nonviolence will present it as not merely a narrow political practice but a philosophy that deserves to penetrate the very social fabric and root out violence in all its manifestations.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pacifism simply does not resonate in people’s everyday realities, unless those people live in some extravagant bubble of tranquility from which all forms of civilization’s pandemic reactive violence have been pushed out by the systemic and less visible violence of police and military forces.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People must build a culture that allows everyone to self-identify in terms of gender and that supports us as we build healthy relationships and heal from generations of violence and trauma.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oppressive social hierarchies exist and replicate themselves in the behavior of all subjects and must be overcome internally as well as externally.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The pacifist avoidance of self-criticism is functional, not just typical. When your strategy’s victory comes from “captur[ing] and maintain[ing] the moral high ground,” it is necessary to portray yourself as moral and your enemy as immoral.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For revolutionary activists, however, victory comes from building power and out-strategizing the state. Such a path requires constant assessment and self-criticism.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Arguing against nonviolence and in favor of a diversity of tactics should not at all imply a satisfaction with the strategies or cultures of past militant groups.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In such a society (e.g. ours), pacifism really is passivism because not committing violence really has more to do with avoiding culpability than with taking responsibility.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After a revolution that destroys all the structures of capitalism - seizes all the factories, redistributes the land, burns all the money - people who are philosophically capitalist need not be purged or intimidated with irrational authority, because lacking a military apparatus to implement capitalism or a police apparatus to protect it, they as people are quite harmless, and will either one day learn to do something creative with their lives or they’ll starve to death without realizing that they can no longer pay someone to slave for them.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Losing fights can still be better than not fighting at all, because it empowers people, and teaches us that we can fight.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We can never know whether our analysis and our methods are wrong, except sometimes with hindsight. Our movements are stronger when they employ diverse methods and analyses and these different positions criticize one another.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Violence” is whatever the person speaking at the moment decides to describe as violent. Usually, this means things they do not like. As a result, the use of the category “violence” tends towards hypocrisy. If it is done to me, it is violent. If it is done by me or for my benefit, it is justified, acceptable, or even invisible.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are all forced to participate in a society that is held together by structural violence, and rewarded for our participation with various privileges, though these privileges are spread unevenly across society. Given that those who use some form of visible, antisocial violence are often the least likely to enjoy the privileges of structural violence, there is no feasible way to determine who is violent and who is not.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Violence” was a euphemism for a threat to the ruling order and its illusion of social peace, with which the class struggle, the brutality of patriarchy, and the murderousness of colonialism are hidden. The newspapers did not talk about violence when cops killed strikers, when landlords evicted families, or when poor people died of hunger. They talked about violence when workers went on strike, when tenants stopped paying rent, when street vendors refused to surrender their wares to the cops.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Freedom as a concept sides with those who are struggling for theirs, whereas nonviolence as a concept sides with the enforcers of normality and the rulers of the status quo.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The goal of our criticism should be solidarity, not homogeneity.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Governments are by their nature aggressive and dominating. No society is safe if its neighbor is a state.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Democracy requires social peace, the illusion that, in a society based on exploitation and domination, everyone can get along and nobody's fundamental well-being is under threat.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Democracy is merely another way to organize exploitation, oppression, and social control. Democratic governments have coexisted with slavery, colonialism, warfare, the most patriarchal societies with some of the most unequal concentrations of wealth, the destruction of the environment, starvation, extreme poverty, the pathologization or murder of trans people, labor exploitation, job and housing precarity, homelessness, exclusion from healthcare, genocide, and any other bad thing we can think of.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Capitalism is based on the endless accumulation of wealth, extracted from the environment and from our labor, and government is based on the accumulation of power and control directly stolen from all the rest of us. A marriage between these two systems, which has defined the social reality for at least five hundred years, means everyone gets fucked.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Governments can be democratic or not, more or less corrupt, but they will still pursue the same basic goals, and they will still be controlled by an elite. Government by its very nature concentrates power and excludes people from making decisions over their own lives.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the world today, governments and corporations hold a near-total monopoly on power, a major aspect of which is violence. Unless we change the power relationships (and, preferably, destroy the infrastructure and culture of centralized power to make impossible the subjugation of the many to the few), those who currently benefit from the ubiquitous structural violence, who control the militaries, banks, bureaucracies, and corporations, will continue to call the shots. The elite cannot be persuaded by appeals to their conscience. Individuals who do change their minds and find a better morality will be fired, impeached, replaced, recalled, assassinated.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nonviolence is an inherently privileged position in the modern context. Besides the fact that the typical pacifist is quite clearly white and middle class, pacifism as an ideology comes from a privileged context. It ignores that violence is already here; that violence is an unavoidable, structurally integral part of the current social hierarchy; and that it is people of color who are most affected by that violence. Pacifism assumes that white people who grew up in the suburbs with all their basic needs met can counsel oppressed people, many of whom are people of color, to suffer patiently under an inconceivably greater violence, until such time as the Great White Father is swayed by the movement’s demands or the pacifists achieve that legendary “critical mass.”
Peter Gelderloos (born 1982) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source