Quote collection
288 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed."
"Out of the chaos, the future emerges in harmony and beauty."
"Indeed, the keynote of government is injustice. With the arrogance and self-sufficiency of the King who could do no wrong, governments ordain, judge, condemn, and punish the most insignificant offenses, while maintaining themselves by the greatest of all offenses, the annihilation of individual liberty."
"Patriotism is a menace to liberty."
"Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime."
"One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; the extreme thing is generally the true thing."
"No, it is not because woman is lacking in responsibility, but because she has too much of the latter that she demands to know how to prevent conception."
"all government, whatever its forms or pretenses, is a dead weight that paralyzes the free spirit and activities of the masses."
"In the struggle for supremacy the various political parties outdo each other in trickery, deceit, cunning, and shady machinations, confident that the one who succeeds is sure to be hailed by the majority as the victor. That is the only god--Success. As to what expense, what terrible cost to character, is of no moment."
"The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society."
"Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be."
"No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution - Revolution is but thought carried into action. Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass."
"Leo Tolstoy ... defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers."
"You cannot build up a standing army and then throw it back into a box like tin soldiers. Armies equipped to the teeth with weapons, with highly developed instruments of murder and backed by their military interests, have their own dynamic functions."
"religion and morality are a much better whip to keep people in submission than even the club and the gun."
"Morality and its victim, the mother - what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?"
"Social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass."
"Man must get back to himself before he can learn his relation to his fellows. Prometheus chained to the Rock of Ages is doomed to remain the prey of the vultures of darkness. Unbind Prometheus, and you dispel the night and its horrors."
"Free love? as if love is anything but free. Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love."
"It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality."