Quotes by Emma Goldman

“I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.”

“ 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. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to ...”

“I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our...”

“People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.”

“Love is it's own protection.”

“To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.”

“If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.”

“When we can't dream any longer we die.”

“Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against "society," that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the S...”

“Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.”

“Every society has the criminals it deserves.”

“I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our...”

“No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditi...”

“The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying...”

“Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of huma...”

“Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.”

“The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass.”

“Consciously or unconsciously, most theists see in gods and devils, heaven and hell, reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness and contentment.... The philosophy of a...”

“I have often been asked why I maintained such a non-compromising antagonism to government and in what way I have found myself oppressed by it. In my opinion every individual is hampered by it. It e...”

“[M]an has as much liberty as he is willing to take.”