Peter Kropotkin Quotes

Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization

The hopeless don't revolt, because revolution is an act of hope.

Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor.

The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.

Where there is authority, there is no freedom.

Think about the world you want to live and work in. What do you need to know to build the world? Demand that your teachers teach you that.

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?

In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it.

Poverty, the existence of the poor, was the first cause of riches.

I understand regicide as a means of obtaining vengeance for the ruin of our lives, but regicide as a means of obtaining political freedom I could never understand.

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.

Struggle so that all may live this rich, overflowing life. And be sure that in this struggle you will find a joy greater than anything else can give.

Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state.

As an anarchist, I cannot reconcile myself to any government.

The two great movements of our century -- towards Liberty of the individual and social co-operation of the whole community -- are summed up in Anarchist-Communism.

Waste of time is the leading feature of our present education. Not only are we taught a mass of rubbish, but what is not rubbish is taught so as to make us waste over it as much time as possible.

Idlers do not make history: they suffer it!

When one has talent, everything contributes to its development.

A national movement, which does not include in its platform the demand for an economical change advantageous to the masses has no chance of success unless supported by foreign aid.

The immense and ever increasing sums which the state wrings from the people are never enough for it; it mortgages the income of future generations, and steers resolutely toward bankruptcy.

Revolutions, we must remember, are always made by minorities.

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.

Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle.

Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none.

Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin], your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.

Of all parties I now see only one party- The Anarchist- which respects human life, and loudly insists upon the abolition of capital punishment, prison torture and punishment of man by man altogether.

You reason like the king, who, being sent across the frontier, called out, 'What will become of my poor subjects without me?'

We take men for what they are worth - and that is why we hate the government of man by man, and that we work with all our might - perhaps not strong enough - to put an end to it.

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.

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?

War is the usual condition of Europe. A thirty years' supply of causes of war is always on hand.

The moral sense is a natural faculty in us like the sense of smell or of touch.

War is the usual condition of Europe.

The future cannot be legislated. All that can be done is to anticipate its most important movements and to clear the path for them.

He objected, though, to indiscriminate reading. 'One must have some question,' he wrote, 'addressed to the book one is going to read.