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Voltairine de Cleyre

64 quotes

“Years! Years, ye shall mix with me! Ye shall grow a part Of the laughing Sea; Of the moaning heart Of the glittered wave Of the sun-gleam's dart In the ocean-grave. Fair, cold, and faithless wert thou, my own! For that I love Thy heart of stone! From the heights above To the depths below, Where dread things move, There is naught can show A life so trustless! Proud be thy crown! Ruthless, like none, save the Sea, alone!”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) first seen 1891 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Dirge of the Sea" (April 1891)
“Written in red their protest stands, For the Gods of the World to see; On the dooming wall their bodiless hands have blazoned "Upharsin," and flaring brands Illumine the message: "Seize the lands! Open the prisons and make men free!" Flame out the living words of the dead Written-in-red.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gods of the World! Their mouths are dumb! Your guns have spoken and they are dust. But the shrouded Living, whose hearts were numb, have felt the beat of a wakening drum Within them sounding — the Dead men’s tongue — Calling: "Smite off the ancient rust!" Have beheld "Resurrexit," the word of the Dead, Written-in-red.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bear it aloft, O roaring flame! Skyward aloft, where all may see. Slaves of the World! Our cause is the same; One is the immemorial shame; One is the struggle, and in One name — Manhood— we battle to set men free. "Uncurse us the Land!" burn the words of the Dead, Written-in-red.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The moonlight rolls down like a river, The silence streams out like a sea; And far where the eastern winds quiver, My farewell goes floating to thee.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And sometimes when I am weary, When the path is thorny and Wild, I'll look back to the Eyes in the twilight, Back to the eyes that smiled.And pray that a wreath like a rainbow May slip from the beautiful past, And Crown me again with the sweet, strong love And keep me, and hold me fast.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the way is not strown with petal soft, It is covered with hearts that weep, And the wounds I tread touch a deeper source Than you think it mine to keep. Down the years I shall move without you, Yet ever must feel the blow That caused me a deeper pain to give Than you will ever know.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But the world moves on, and the piteous Earth Still groans in the monster pain; And the star that leads me points onward yet, Though the red drops fall like rain!”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ah, not to a blaze of light I go, Nor shouts of a triumph train; I go down to kiss the dregs of woe, And drink up the Cup of Pain. And whether a scaffold or crucifix waits 'Neath the light of my silver star, I know and I care not: I only know I shall pause not though it be far.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Though a crucified life or an agonized death, Though long, or quick and sharp, I am firmly wrought in the endless thread Of Destiny's woof and warp. And I do not shrink, though a wave of pain Sobs over me now and then, As I think of those "saddest of all sad words," The pitiful "might have been.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ay, gather your petals and take them back To the dead heart under the dew; And crown it again with the red love bloom, For the dead are always true. But go not "back to the sediment" In the slime of the moaning sea, For a better world belongs to you, And a better friend to me.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The paramount question of the day is not political, is not religious, but is economic. The crying-out demand of today is for a circle of principles that shall forever make it impossible for one man to control another by controlling the means of his existence.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“First, then, God, being all-just, wishes to do justice; being all-wise, knows what justice is; being all-powerful, can do justice. Why then injustice? Either your God can do justice and won't or doesn't know what justice is, or he cannot do it. The immediate reply is: "What appears to be injustice in our eyes, in the sight of omniscience may be justice. God's ways are not our ways." Oh, but if he is the all-wise pattern, they should be; what is good enough for God ought to be good enough for man; but what is too mean for man won't do in a God.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Note the difference between a right and a privilege. A right, in the abstract, is a fact; it is not a thing to be given, established, or conferred; it is. Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never. Privilege, in the abstract, does not exist; there is no such thing. Rights recognized, privilege is destroyed. But, in the practical, the moment you admit a supreme authority, you have denied rights. Practically the supremacy has all the rights, and no matter what the human race possesses, it does so merely at the caprice of that authority.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Government is as unreal, as intangible, as unapproachable as God. Try it, if you don't believe it. Seek through the legislative halls of America and find, if you can, the Government. In the end you will be doomed to confer with the agent, as before.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An agent is usually held accountable to his principals. If you do not know the individuals who voted for you, then you do not know for whom you are acting, nor to whom you are accountable. If any body of persons has delegated to you any authority, the disposal of any right or part of a right (supposing a right to be transferable), you must have received it from the individuals composing that body; and you must have some means of learning who those individuals are, or you cannot know for whom you act, and you are utterly irresponsible as an agent.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man won't steal, ordinarily, unless that which he steals is something he cannot as easily get without stealing; in liberty the cost of stealing would involve greater difficulties than producing, and consequently he would not be apt to steal. But suppose a man steals. Today you go to a representative of that power which has robbed you of the earth, of the right of free contract of the means of exchange, taxes you for everything you eat or wear (the meanest form of robbery), — you go to him for redress from a thief!”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think it can be shown that the law makes ten criminals where it restrains one. On that basis it would not, as a matter of policy merely, be an economical institution.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“O height and depth of purity, which fears so much that the children will not know who their fathers are, because, forsooth, they must rely upon their mother's word instead of the hired certification of some priest of the Church, or the Law! I wonder if the children would be improved to know what their fathers have done. I would rather, much rather, not know who my father was than know he had been a tyrant to my mother. I would rather, much rather, be illegitimate according to the statutes of men, than illegitimate according to the unchanging law of Nature.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From the birth of the Church, out of the womb of Fear and the fatherhood of Ignorance, it has taught the inferiority of woman. In one form or another through the various mythical legends of the various mythical creeds, runs the undercurrent of the behef in the fall of man through the persuasion of woman, her subjective condition as punishment, her natural vileness, total depravity, etc.; and from the days of Adam until now the Christian Church, with which we live specially to deal, has made Woman the excuse, the scapegoat for the evil deeds of man.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When America passed the fugitive slave law compelling men to catch their fellows more brutally than runaway dogs, Canada, aristocratic, unrepublican Canada, still stretched her arms to those who might reach her. But there is no refuge upon earth for the enslaved sex. Right where we are, there we must dig our trenches, and win or die.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This, then, is the tyranny of the State; it denies, to both woman and man, the right to earn a living, and grants it as a privilege to a favored few who for that favor must pay ninety per cent toll to the granters of it. These two things, the mind domination of the Church, and the body domination of the State are the causes of sex slavery.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are permitted to ride, providing we sit in a position ruinous to the horse; providing we wear a riding-habit long enough to hide the obscene human foot, weighed down by ten pounds of gravel to cheat the wind in its free blowing, so running the risk of disabling ourselves completely should accident throw us from the saddle. Think how we swim! We must even wear clothing in the water, and run the gauntlet of derision, if we dare battle in the surf minus stockings!”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one can hate petitions worse than I, and no one has less faith in them than I. But for my champion I am willing to try any means that invades no other's right, even though I have little hope in it.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Humanity can not be made equal by declarations on paper. Unless the material conditions for equality exist, it is worse than mockery to pronounce men equal. And unless there is equality (and by equality I mean equal chances for every one to make the most of himself) unless, I say, these equal chances exist, freedom, either of thought, speech, or action, is equally a mockery.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Private enterprise manages better all that to which it is equal. Anarchism declares that private enterprise, whether individual or cooperative, is equal to all the undertakings of society.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We arrive at the point where we, looking over the hundred and twenty five years of independence, can see that the simple government conceived by the revolutionary republicans was a foredoomed failure. It was so because of: 1) the essence of government itself; 2) the essence of human nature; 3) the essence of Commerce and Manufacture.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As to the essence of human nature, what our national experience has made plain is this, that to remain in a continually exalted moral condition is not human nature. That has happened which was prophesied: we have gone down hill from the Revolution until now; we are absorbed in "mere money-getting.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is not upon the face of the earth today a government so utterly and shamelessly corrupt as that of the United States of America. There are others more cruel, more tyrannical, more devastating; there is none so utterly venal.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is an American tradition that a standing army is a standing menace to liberty; in Jefferson's presidency the army was reduced to 3,000 men. It is American tradition that we keep out of the affairs of other nations. It is American practice that we meddle with the affairs of everybody else from the West to the East Indies, from Russia to Japan; and to do it we have a standing army of 83,251 men.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you choose the liberty and pride and strength of the single soul, and the free fraternization of men, as the purpose which your life is to make manifest then do not sell it for tinsel. Think that your soul is strong and will hold its way; and slowly, through bitter struggle perhaps the strength will grow. And the foregoing of possessions for which others barter the last possibility of freedom will become easy.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us have Men, Men who will say a word to their souls and keep it — keep it not when it is easy, but keep it when it is hard — keep it when the storm roars and there is a white-streaked sky and blue thunder before, and one's eyes are blinded and one's ears deafened with the war of opposing things; and keep it under the long leaden sky and the gray dreariness that never lifts. Hold unto the last: that is what it means to have a Dominant Idea, which Circumstance cannot break. And such men make and unmake Circumstance.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once a great human demand is so made, it is never let go again. Future revolts will go on from there; they will never fall behind it.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As the peoples always move,—as Life, which is greater than the peoples, always moves. And the business of the revolutionist, the Seeker for the Changes of Old Forms, the dreamer of Liberty and Plenty, is to be with them in their struggle, in their victory, in their defeat, whenever, wherever, the people rise.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hail to the Mexican Revolution, victorious or defeated. And hail to the next that rises!”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every person who ever thought he had a right to assert, and went boldly and asserted it, himself, or jointly with others that shared his convictions, was a direct actionist. Some thirty years ago I recall that the Salvation Army was vigorously practising direct action in the maintenance of the freedom of its members to speak, assemble, and pray. Over and over they were arrested, fined, and imprisoned; but they kept right on singing, praying, and marching, till they finally compelled their persecutors to let them alone.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Workers, the most absolutely necessary part of the whole social structure, without whose services none can either eat, or clothe, or shelter himself, are just the ones who get the least to eat, to wear, and to be housed withal — to say nothing of their share of the other social benefits which the rest of us are supposed to furnish, such as education and artistic gratification.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is one common struggle against those who have appropriated the earth, the money, and the machines.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Progress has to do with all mankind, not alone with the calm, the wise, and the patient. There is youth in the world, and youth is generally neither calm nor patient; it does not like to sit in the rear rows and listen to mature considerations rendered in the tone of a stock-market quotation concerning questions that are burning up its heart, itself silent; if it did, it might learn to be wise and calm,—and also ashy and inert. There is feeling in the world, and a very great quantity of it; and those who do the suffering and the sympathizing may be expected to say and to do many things not within the limits of logic.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) first seen 1907 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Events Are the True Schoolmasters, Mother Earth Vol I, No. 11, January 1907; republished in Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre—Feminist, Anarchist, Genius by State University of New York Press
“This is not a question of expediency, but of right. In antebellum days the proposition was not, Are the blacks good enough to be free? but, Have they the right? So today the question is not, Will outrages result from freeing humanity? but, Has it the right to life, the means of life, the opportunities of happiness? In the transition epoch, surely crimes will come. Did the seed of tyranny ever bear good fruit? And can you expect Liberty to undo in a moment what Oppression has been doing for ages? Criminals are the crop of despots, as much a necessary expression of the evil in society as an ulcer is of disease in the blood; and so long as the taint of the poison remains, so long there will be crimes.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For it must needs that offences come, but woe to him through whom the offence cometh." The crimes of the future are the harvests sown of the ruling classes of the present. Woe to the tyrant who shall cause the offense! 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:”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why, when murder now is stalking in your streets, when dens of infamy are so thick within your city that competition has forced down the price of prostitution to the level of the wages of your starving shirt makers; when robbers sit in State and national Senate and House, when the boasted "bulwark of our liberties," the elective franchise, has become a U. S. dice-box, wherewith great gamblers play away your liberties; when debauchees of the worst type hold all your public offices and dine off the food of fools who support them, why, then, sits Moses Harman there within his prison cell? If he is so great a criminal, why is he not with the rest of the spawn of crime, dining at Delmonico's or enjoying a trip to Europe? If he is so bad a man, why in the name of wonder did he ever get in the penitentiary? … He looked, this obscenist looked with clear eyes into this ill-got thing you call morality, sealed with the seal of marriage, and saw in it the consummation of immorality, impurity, and injustice. He beheld every married woman what she is, a bonded slave, who takes her master's name, her master's bread, her master's commands, and serves her master's passion; who passes through the ordeal of pregnancy and the throes of travail at his dictation, not at her desire; who can control no property, not even her own body, without his consent, and from whose straining arms the children she bears may be torn at his pleasure, or willed away while they are yet unborn. It is said the English language has a sweeter word than any other, — home. But Moses Harman looked beneath the word and saw the fact, — a prison more horrible than that where he is sitting now, whose corridors radiate over all the earth, and with so many cells, that none may count them.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That is adultery where woman submits herself sexually to man, without desire on her part, for the sake of "keeping him virtuous," "keeping him at home," the women say. (Well, if a man did not love me and respect himself enough to be "virtuous" without prostituting me, — he might go, and welcome. He has no virtue to keep.) And that is rape, where a man forces himself sexually upon a woman whether he is licensed by the marriage law to do it or not. And that is the vilest of all tyranny where a man compels the woman he says he loves, to endure the agony of bearing children that she does not want, and for whom, as is the rule rather than the exception, they cannot properly provide. It is worse than any other human oppression; it is fairly God-like! To the sexual tyrant there is no parallel upon earth; one must go to the skies to find a fiend who thrusts life upon his children only to starve and curse and outcast and damn them!”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He cried out through the letter of Dr. Markland, that a young mother lacerated by unskillful surgery in the birth of her babe, but recovering from a subsequent successful operation, had been stabbed, remorselessly, cruelly, brutally stabbed, not with a knife, but with the procreative organ of her husband, stabbed to the doors of death, and yet there was no redress! And because he called a spade a spade, because he named that organ by its own name, so given in Webster's dictionary and in every medical journal in the country, because of this Moses Harman walks to and fro in his cell tonight. He gave a concrete example of the effect of sex slavery, and for it he is imprisoned. It remains for us now to carry on the battle, and lift the standard where they struck him down, to scatter broadcast the knowledge of this crime of society against a man and the reason for it; to inquire into this vast system of licensed crime, its cause and its effect, broadly upon the race.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there is one thing more than another in this whole accursed tissue of false society, which makes me angry, it is the asinine stupidity which with the true phlegm of impenetrable dullness says, "Why don't the women leave!" Will you tell me where they will go and what they shall do? When the State, the legislators, has given to itself, the politicians, the utter and absolute control of the opportunity to live; when, through this precious monopoly, already the market of labor is so overstocked that workmen and workwomen are cutting each others' throats for the dear privilege of serving their lords; when girls are shipped from Boston to the south and north, shipped in carloads, like cattle, to fill the dives of New Orleans or the lumber-camp hells of my own state...”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Who thinks a dog is impure or obscene because its body is not covered with suffocating and annoying clothes? What would you think of the meanness of a man who would put a skirt upon his, horse and compel it to walk or run with such a thing impeding its limbs? Why, the "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals" would arrest him, take the beast from him, and he would be sent to a lunatic asylum for treatment on the score of an impure mind. And yet, gentlemen, you expect your wives, the creatures you say you respect and love, to wear the longest skirts and the highest necked clothing, in order to conceal the obscene human body. There is no society for the prevention of cruelty to women.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the name of Purity what lies are told! What queer morality it has engendered. For fear of it you dare not tell your own children the truth about their birth; the most sacred of all functions, the creation of a human being, is a subject for the most miserable falsehood. When they come to you with a simple, straightforward question, which they have a right to ask, you say, "Don't ask such questions," or tell some silly hollowlog story; or you explain the incomprehensibility by another — God! You say "God made you." You know you are lying when you say it. You know, or you ought to know, that the source of inquiry will not be dammed up so. You know that what you Could explain purely, reverently, rightly (if you have any purity in you), will be learned through many blind gropings, and that around it will be cast the shadowthought of wrong, embryo'd by your denial and nurtured by this social opinion everywhere prevalent. If you do not know this, then you are blind to facts and deaf to Experience.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Look how your children grow up. Taught from their earliest infancy to curb their love natures — restrained at every turn! Your blasting lies would even blacken a child's kiss. Little girls must not be tomboyish, must not go barefoot, must not climb trees, must not learn to swim, must not do anything they desire to do which Madame Grundy has decreed "improper." Little boys are laughed at as effeminate, silly girl-boys if they want to make patchwork or play with a doll. Then when they grow up, "Oh! Men dont care for home or children as women do!" Why should they, when the deliberate effort of your life has been to crush that nature out of them. "Women can't rough it like men." Train any animal, or any plant, as you train your girls, and it wont be able to rough it either.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now for the remedy. It is in one word, the only word that ever brought equity anywhere — LIBERTY! Centuries upon centuries of liberty is the only thing that will cause the disintegration and decay of these pestiferous ideas. Liberty was all that calmed the bloodwaves of religious persecution! You cannot cure serfhood by any other substitution. Not for you to say "in this way shall the race love." Let the race alone. Will there not be atrocious crimes? Certainly. He is a fool who says there will not be. But you can't stop them by committing the arch-crime and setting a block between the spokes of Progress-wheels. You will never get right until you start right. As for the final outcome, it matters not one iota. I have my ideal, and it is very pure, and very sacred to me. But yours, equally sacred, may be different and we may both be wrong. But certain am I that with free contract, that form of sexual association will survive which is best adapted to time and place, thus producing the highest evolution of the type. Whether that shall be monogamy, variety, or promiscuity matters naught to us; it is the business of the future, to which we dare not dictate.”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman bid them "move on"; as long as they go from factory to factory, begging for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and foremen, getting the old "no," the old shake of the head, in these factories they built, whose machines they wrought; so long as they consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized, cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing thro' plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made, but cannot buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer, or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be delayed. When they conceive the possibility of a complete international federation of labor, whose constituent groups shall take possession of land, mines, factories, all the instruments of production, issue their own certificates of exchange, and, in short, conduct their own industry without regulative interference from law-makers or employers, then we may hope for the only help which counts for aught — Self-Help; the only condition which can guarantee free speech (and no paper guarantee needed).”
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) said by 1912 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source