Murray Bookchin Quotes

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.

The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.

Capitalism is a social cancer. It has always been a social cancer. It is the disease of society. It is the malignancy of society.

Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.

An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.

There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.

People are never free of trying to be content.

Until we become the architects of a society that is truly free and ecological, it will always seem that when the human brain is not adaptive, it is more often destructive than creative.

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.

My main interests right now are to publish, to write, to explicate various views which I hope have an impact on thinking people.

I do have an intense respect for pacifists, because I believe that ultimately, if we are to have a truly humanistic as well as libertarian society, violence will have to be banished on this planet.

I believe that anarchists should agree to disagree but not to fight with each other.

The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.

My anarchism is frankly anarcho-communalism, and it's eco-anarchism as well. And it's not oriented toward the proletariat.

My communism attempts basically to create a shared society, that's all; a shared society in which individuality will flourish, along with love, and along with mutual respect.

I will never surrender the rights of the individual - the complete rights of the individual - to any "ism" whatever.

I regard Marxism as the most sinister and the most subtle form of totalitarianism.

Deny my individuality and I become an animal, mute, a mere creature of all the forces that act upon me.

I believe in a libertarian communist society.

I believe that there has to be an ideal and I favour an ethical anarchism which can be cohered into an ideal.

I'm not sitting in judgment on whether or not libertarians can participate in a political process whose very nature they oppose.

I'm sorry that some self-styled anarchists have picked up on the word spirit and have turned me into a theological ecologist, a notion which I think is crude beyond all belief.

I'm a Bookchinite, and nobody has a right to claim that but me.

We don't have to go around as the Protestant reformation did, or as the socialist revolution did, and execute each other as soon as we are successful - assuming we'll ever be successful.

I am concerned that people who admire [Ayn] Rand are not often critical enough of the extent to which she has abridged the implications of [her] novels.

I was raised as a red diaper baby.

I got deeply involved with the Trotskyists. I assumed simply that my enemy's enemies were my friends.

I don't want to think any longer simply in terms of the Spanish Revolution or the Russian Revolution. It doesn't make any sense to talk [Peter] Makhno to an American.

I know one thing: that you can do a lot of things but if you don't educate people into conscious anarchism it gets frittered away.

My thinking is very flexible, and I hope that it will remain flexible and creative as long as biology permits me to think and that I will remain a rebel all my life.

I've had training in electronics engineering, of all things, and in languages. But I've never taken any degree, something I share with Lewis Mumford, I think.

Realistically speaking, Ayn Rand should not have opposed the antidraft movement and supported the Vietnam War effort - in effect, she supported military conscription.

New England has a strong tradition of localism. What is ordinarily called election day in most of the United States is called town meeting day in Vermont.

I don't think that the Soviet Union and China are accidents, aberrations; I think they follow from Marxism-Leninism. I think that Leninism comes out of Marx's basic convictions.

I feel that we have some opportunity in North America to go back and say the American Revolution was the real thing.

My feeling is that whatever people elect to do, insofar as they don't deny the rights of others, every effort should be made to defend their right to do it.

I have a great admiration for pacifism, but I'm not a pacifist, mainly because I would defend myself if I were attacked.

I'm by no means convinced that capitalism and the development of technology has made anarchism easier.

When I die Bookchinism comes to an end, and all the allusions to it both among Marxists and anarchists.

I think it's terribly important that networks of anarchists establish themselves with a view toward educating people.

I'm convinced more than ever that capitalism, with its technological development, has not been an advance toward freedom but has been an enormous setback of freedom.

Terms that are related to individuals like Marxist, or Hegelian, or Bakuninist, or Kropotkinist, are completely outside my intellectual and emotional horizon. I'm a follower of no one.