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Peter Kropotkin

133 quotes

“America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society. The peoples of the world are becoming profoundly dissatisfied and are not appeased by the promise of the social-democrats to patch up the State into a new engine of oppression.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) first seen 1891 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech (26 September 1891); as quoted in Peter Kropotkin : From Prince to Rebel (1990) by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, p. 269
“You know how I always believe in the future … Without disorder, the revolution is impossible; knowing that, I did not lose hope, and I do not lose it now.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to a friend (November 1920), as quoted in Peter Kropotkin : From Prince to Rebel (1990) by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, p. 428
“Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none. He is a madman, an immolator, wishful of burning, and slaughter, and sacrificing.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Peter Kropotkin : From Prince to Rebel (1990) by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, p. 407
“I of course take a negative attitude about a great deal that is happening, and I have said so directly and frankly to many of those who stand at the head of government. They behave well towards me, and many things I asked were carried out. They even proposed that I should take part in their work, but I refused. As an anarchist, I cannot reconcile myself to any government.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: About the Bolshevik revolution, as quoted in Peter Kropotkin : From Prince to Rebel (1990) by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, p. 428
“The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Words of a Rebel"; as quoted in The Heretic's Handbook of Quotations: Cutting Comments on Burning Issues (1992) by Charles Bufe, p. 26
“The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Words of a Rebel"; as quoted in The Heretic's Handbook of Quotations: Cutting Comments on Burning Issues (1992) by Charles Bufe, p. 26
“More than a century has passed since science laid down sound propositions as to the origins of the universe, but how many have mastered them or possess the really scientific spirit of criticism? A few thousands at the outside, who are lost in the midst of hundreds of millions still steeped in prejudices and superstitions worthy of savages, who are consequently ever ready to serve as puppets for religious impostors.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we have but the will to do it, that very moment will Justice be done: that very instant the tyrants of the Earth shall bite the dust.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable. New ideas germinate everywhere, seeking to force their way into the light, to find an application in life; everywhere they are opposed by the inertia of those whose interest it is to maintain the old order; they suffocate in the stifling atmosphere of prejudice and traditions.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The direction which the revolution will take depends, no doubt, upon the sum total of the various circumstances that determine the coming of the cataclysm. But it can be predicted in advance, according to the vigor of revolutionary action displayed in the preparatory period by the different progressive parties. … The party which has made most revolutionary propaganda and which has shown most spirit and daring will be listened to on the day when it is necessary to act, to march in front in order to realize the revolution.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If on the morrow of the revolution, the masses of the people have only phrases at their service, if they do not recognize, by clear and blinding facts, that the situation has been transformed to their advantage, if the overthrow ends only in a change of persons and forumlae, nothing will have been achieved. … In order that the revolution should be something more than a word, in order that the reaction should not lead us back tomorrow to the situation of yesterday, the conquest of today must be worth the trouble of defending; the poor of yesterday must not be the poor today.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Anarchism : A History Of Libertarian Ideas And Movements (2004) by George Woodcock
“Cleverly assorted scraps of spurious science are inculcated upon the children to prove necessity of law; obedience to the law is made a religion; moral goodness and the law of the masters are fused into one and the same divinity. The historical hero of the schoolroom is the man who obeys the law, and defends it against rebels.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The confused mass of rules of conduct called law, which has been bequeathed to us by slavery, serfdom, feudalism, and royalty, has taken the place of those stone monsters, before whom human victims used to be immolated, and whom slavish savages dared not even touch lest they should be slain by the thunderbolts of heaven.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All this we see, and, therefore, instead of inanely repeating the old formula, "Respect the law," we say, "Despise law and all its Attributes!" In place of the cowardly phrase, "Obey the law," our cry, is "Revolt against all laws!”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While in the course of ages the nucleus of social custom inscribed in law has been subjected to but slight and gradual modifications, the other portion has been largely developed in directions indicated by the interests of the dominant classes, and to the injury of the classes they oppress.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The millions of laws which exist for the regulation of humanity appear upon investigation to be divided into three principal categories: protection of property, protection of persons, protection of government. And by analyzing each of these three categories, we arrive at the same logical and necessary conclusion: the uselessness and hurtfulness of law.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The whole aspect of the universe changes with this new conception. The idea of force governing the world, of pre-established law, preconceived harmony, disappears to make room for the harmony that Fourier had caught a glimpse of: the one which results from the disorderly and incoherent movements of numberless hosts of matter, each of which goes its own way and all of which hold each other in equilibrium.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Each individual is a cosmos of organs, each organ is a cosmos of cells, each cell is a cosmos of infinitely small ones; and in this complex world, the well-being of the whole depends entirely on the sum of well-being enjoyed by each of the least microscopic particles of organized matter. A whole revolution is thus produced in the philosophy of life.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists. "Speak not of liberty — poverty is slavery!" is not a vain formula; it has penetrated into the ideas of the great working-class masses; it filters through all the present literature; it even carries those along who live on the poverty of others, and takes from them the arrogance with which they formerly asserted their rights to exploitation.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All is linked, all holds together under the present economic system, and all tends to make the fall of the industrial and mercantile system under which we live inevitable. Its duration is but a question of time that may already be counted by years and no longer by centuries. A question of time — and energetic attack on our part! Idlers do not make history: they suffer it!”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is only by the abolition of the State, by the conquest of perfect liberty by the individual, by free agreement, association, and absolute free federation that we can reach Communism — the possession in common of our social inheritance, and the production in common of all riches.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Educated men — "civilized," as Fourier used to say with disdain — tremble at the idea that society might some day be without judges, police, or gaolers.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Have not prisons — which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe — always been universities of crime? Is not the court of a tribunal a school of ferocity?”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we ask for the abolition of the State and its organs we are always told that we dream of a society composed of men better than they are in reality. But no; a thousand times, no. All we ask is that men should not be made worse than they are, by such institutions!”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not only has a coercive system contributed and powerfully aided to create all the present economical, political and social evils, but it has given proof of its absolute impotence to raise the moral level of societies; it has not been even able to maintain it at the level it had already reached. If a benevolent fairy could only reveal to our eyes all the crimes that are committed every day, every minute, in a civilized society under cover of the unknown, or the protection of law itself, — society would shudder at that terrible state of affairs.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Practised for centuries, repression has so badly succeeded that it has but led us into a blind alley from which we can only issue by carrying torch and hatchet into the institutions of our authoritarian past.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The third element alone remains — the institution itself, acting in such a way as to make social acts a state of habit and instinct. This element — history proves it — has never missed its aim, never has it acted as a double-bladed sword; and its influence has only been weakened when custom strove to become immovable, crystallized, to become in its turn a religion not to be questioned when it endeavored to absorb the individual, taking all freedom of action from him and compelling him to revolt against that which had become, through its crystallization, an enemy to progress.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The State is only one of the forms assumed by society in the course of history. Why then make no distinction between what is permanent and what is accidental?”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Either the State for ever, crushing individual and local life, taking over in all fields of human activity, bringing with it its wars and its domestic struggles for power, its palace revolutions which only replace one tyrant by another, and inevitably at the end of this development there is … death! Or the destruction of States, and new life starting again in thousands of centers on the principle of the lively initiative of the individual and groups and that of free agreement. The choice lies with you!”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Millions of human beings have labored to create this civilization on which we pride ourselves today. Other millions, scattered through the globe, labor to maintain it. Without them nothing would be left in fifty years but ruins.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of man.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We accustom ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to the practice of a double-faced morality. And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselves with sophistry. Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the civilized man. But a society cannot live thus; it must return to truth or cease to exist.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thousands of writers, of poets, of scholars, have laboured to increase knowledge, to dissipate error, and to create that atmosphere of scientific thought, without which the marvels of our century could never appeared. And these thousands of philosophers, of poets, of scholars, of inventors, have themselves been supported by the labour of past centuries. They have been upheld and nourished through life, both physically and mentally, by legions of workers and craftsmen of all sorts. They have drawn their motive force from the environment.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of men.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In virtue of this monstrous system, the son of the worker, on entering life, finds no field which he may till, no machine which he may tend, no mine in which he may dog, without accepting to leave a great part of what he will produce to a master.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective property of the race. Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We must recognize, and loudly proclaim, that every one, whatever his grade in the old society, whether strong or weak, capable or incapable, as, before everything, THE RIGHT TO LIVE, and that society is bound to share amongst all, without exception , the means of existence at its disposal.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From the cradle to the grave all our actions are guided by this principle. Open any book on sociology or jurisprudence, and you will find there the Government, its organization, its acts, filling so large a place that we ome to believe that there is nothing outside the Government and the world of statesmen.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are beginning to see that government by majorities means abandoning all the affairs of the country to the tide-waiters who make up the majorities in the House and in election committees; to those, in a word, who have no pinion of their own.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The landlord owes his riches to the poverty of the peasants, and the wealth of the capitalist comes from the same source.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What we do want is so to arrange things that every human being born into the world shall be ensured the opportunity in the first instance of learning some useful occupation, and of becoming skill in it; next, that he shall be free to work at his trade without asking leave of master or owner, and without handing over to landlord or capitalist the lion's share of what he produces.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That we are Utopians is well known. So Utopian are we that we go the length of believing that the Revolution can and ought to assure shelter, food, and clothes to all — an idea extremely displeasing to middle-class citizens, whatever their party color, for they are quite alive to the fact that it is not easy to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger is satisfied.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is evident, as Proudhon has already pointed our, that the smallest attack upon property will bring in its train the complete disorganization of the system based upon private enterprise and wage labor. Society itself will be forced to take production in hand, in its entirety, and to reorganize it to meet the needs of the whole people.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Collectivism, as we know, does not abolish wages, though it introduces considerable modifications into the existing order of things. It only substitutes the State, that is to say, Representative Government, national or local, for the individual employer of labor. Under Collectivism it is the representatives of the nation, or of the district, and deputies and officials who are to have the control of industry. It is they who reserve to themselves the right of employing the surplus of production — in the interests of all.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The house was not built by its owner. It was erected, decorated, and furnished by innumerable workers — in the timber yard, the brick field, and the workshop, toiling for dear life at a minimum wage.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The great harm done by bourgeois society, as we have already mentioned, is not only that capitalists seize a large share of the profits of each industrial and commercial enterprise, thus enabling them to live without working, but that all reduction has taken a wrong direction, as it is not carried on with a view to securing well-being to all. For this reason we condemn it.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is absolutely incomprehensible to us that intelligent men — and such are not wanting in the collectivist party — can remain partisans of national or municipal parliaments after all the lessons history has given them — in France, in England, in Germany, or in the United States.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not sufficient to distribute the profits realized by a trade in equal parts, if at the same time thousands of other workers are exploited. It is a case of PRODUCING THE GREATEST AMOUNT OF GOODS NECESSARY TO THE WELL-BEING OF ALL, WITH THE LEAST POSSIBLE WASTE OF HUMAN ENERGY.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mine of the future will be well ventilated, with a temperature as easily regulated as that of a library; there will be no horses doomed to die below the earth: underground traction will be carried on by means of an automatic cable put in motion at the pit's mouth.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Accustomed as we are by hereditary prejudices an absolutely unsound education and training to see Government, legislation and magistracy everywhere around, we have come to believe that man would tear his fellow man to pieces like a wild beast the day the police took his eye off him; that chaos would come about if authority were overthrown during a revolution. And with out eyes shut we pass by thousands and thousands of human groupings which form themselves freely, without any intervention of the law, and attain results infinitely superior to those achieved under government tutelage.”
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source