Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

Her heart revolted against the obstacles which were put in the way of her happiness, and her mind was the more open to the powerful criticisms which the great writer launched against the Russian autocracy and all the rotten system of…

Such a house would be the last to be thought of in connection with revolutionary ideas; and yet it was in that house that I made my first acquaintance with the revolutionary literature of the times.

And yet this was, perhaps, the main feature of the movement--that it had the power to penetrate into so ‘well meaning’ a school as our corps was, and to find an echo in such a circle as that of my Moscow relatives.

Censorship was still very rigorous; but what could not be said openly in political articles was smuggled in under the form of novels, humorous sketches, or veiled comments on West European events, and everyone read between the lines and…

But all this longing of the children and youths for real work is wasted simply because our idea of the school is still the mediæval scholasticism, the mediæval monastery!

But we should have worked with the same enthusiasm at tracing a railway, at building a log-house, or at cultivating a garden or a field.

I mention this to show how children and youths long for real applications of what they learn at school in abstract, and how stupid are the educators who are unable to see what a powerful aid they could find in concrete applications for…

This life amidst the peasants in the villages had the best effect upon the intellectual and moral development of many boys.

How often, later on in Siberia, I recalled to memory that object lesson when we also had to do the impossible during our scientific expeditions!

Only enthusiasm and confidence can at such moments induce the soldiers to do ‘the impossible’--and it is the impossible that continually must be accomplished to secure success.

What can discipline do when tired troops have to make a supreme effort to reach the field of battle at a given hour?

I understood then how much depends in warfare upon the state of mind of the troops, and how little can be done by mere discipline when more than an average effort is required from the soldiers.

We were the marching column--he was but an obstacle--and the column would have marched over him. ‘Why should he be in our way?’ the pages said afterwards.

All this may seem childish; but many higher ideas and pure inspirations were kindled in us by this worship of our favourite artists.

In our present factories, machinery work is killing for the worker, because he becomes a lifelong servant to a given machine and never is anything else.

Seeing how a gigantic paw, coming out of a shanty, grasps a log floating in the Nevá, pulls it inside, and puts it under the saws which cut it into boards; or how a huge red-hot iron bar is transformed into a rail after it has passed…

But the chief cause of the relative success which was obtained in the school was that the teaching was rendered as concrete as possible.

The never-ceasing life of the universe, which I conceived as life and evolution, became for me an inexhaustible source of higher poetical thought, and gradually the sense of man’s oneness with Nature, both animate and inanimate--the poetry…

Some of his questions were so original and his explanations so good that they have engraved themselves for ever on my memory.

He was a good mathematician, and taught us physics on a mathematical basis, admirably explaining at the same time the leading ideas of physical research and physical apparatus.

We had an excellent teacher--a very intelligent man with a sarcastic turn of mind, who hated learning from memory, and managed to make us think instead of merely learning facts.

Nothing gives more impetus to one’s intellectual development than some sort of independent research, and these studies of mine immensely helped me afterwards.

Knowing no Latin, I discovered nevertheless a rich supply of original sources in Old Teutonic and Old French, and found an immense æsthetic enjoyment in the quaint structure and expressiveness of the latter in the Chronicles.

I spent weeks under arrest for that frankness, and perhaps should have been excluded from the school, were it not that the inspector of the classes, his assistant, and even our old director, judged that after all I had only expressed aloud…

And a feeling of simplicity and of the natural relations of equality, as well as of hearty good-will, which I always felt afterwards when among peasants or in their houses, took possession of me at that inn.