"Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen."
Anarchy quotes
187 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside anarchy — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries."
"Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel."
"The falcon cannot hear the falconer"
"Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perennially rejuvenated illusions."
"The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism."
"I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people."
"Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best."
"If you never encounter anything in your community that offends you, then you are not living in a free society."
"It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well."
"'What I believe' is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect."
"There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken."
"To the sober person adventurous conduct often seems insanity."
"Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion."
"Unless the Security Council is restored to its pre-eminent position as the sole source of legitimacy on the use of force, we are on a dangerous path to anarchy."
"All governments are in equal measure good and evil. The best ideal is anarchy."
"If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion."
"Better the rule of One, whom all obey, than to let clamorous demagogues betray our freedom with the kiss of anarchy."
"A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish."
"Where you have no religion, you are sure to have no government, for as religion disappears, anarchy takes place and fixes a compleat Hell on earth till religion returns."
"What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it."