Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

The peasant much too easily submits to force, but he does not worship it.

I never saw in a Russian peasant that servility, grown to be a second nature, with which a small functionary talks to a highly placed one, or a valet to his master.

It is the spirit of equality which is highly developed in the Russian peasant and, in fact, in the rural population everywhere.

The chief difference between the educated and the uneducated man is, I should say, in the latter not being able to follow a chain of conclusions.

What the peasant does not understand is abstract notions when they are not illustrated by concrete examples.

The Great Russian peasant perfectly well understands the educated man’s talk, provided that it is not stuffed with words taken from foreign languages.

Nothing of this sort is needed, either in talking to peasants or in writing for them.

Later on, when we were making socialist propaganda among the peasants, I could not but wonder why some of my friends, who had received a seemingly far more democratic education than myself, did not know how to talk to the peasants or to…

But the serious good sense and sound judgment of the Russian peasants which I witnessed during this couple of days, left upon me a lasting impression.

That same year I made my first start as an explorer of popular life, and this little work brought me one step nearer to our peasants, making me see them under a new light; it also helped me later on a great deal in Siberia.

It is awful to think of it: flogging before the corps till he was carried away unconscious on a sheet, and then degradation to a soldiers’ sons’ battalion--anything was possible, in those times.

But you will never link hearts together Unless the linking springs from your own heart.

Petersburg, I went several times to a Roman Catholic church, but the theatrical character of the service and the absence of real feeling in it shocked me, the more so when I saw there with what simple faith some retired Polish soldier or a…

Our father gave us very little spending money, and I never had any to buy a single book; but if Alexander got a few roubles from some aunt, he never spent a penny of it for pleasure, but bought a book and sent it to me.

Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. ‘Read poetry,’ he wrote: ‘poetry makes men better.’ How often, in my after life, I realized the…

What is now taught under this name is anything you like, but it is not geography.

The philosophy and the poetry of nature, the methods of all the exact sciences, and an inspired conception of the life of nature must make part of education.

The philosophy of all the natural sciences--a general view of nature as a whole, something on the lines of the first volume of Humboldt’s ‘Cosmos’--must be conveyed to the pupils and the students, whatsoever may be the extension given to…

In western Europe, and probably in America, this type of teacher seems not to be widely spread; but in Russia there is not a man or woman of mark, in literature or in political life, who does not owe the first impulse toward a higher…

In most of the others something good and elevated simmered at the bottom of their hearts, as if a vision of an unsuspected world was opening before them.

But do not the bewitching powers of all studies lie in that they continually open up to us new and unsuspected horizons, not yet understood, which entice us to proceed farther and farther in the penetration of what appears at first sight…

Words, the trivial meanings of which, when one knows the language colloquially, sometimes interfere with the poetical image they are intended to convey, retain but their subtle, elevated sense; while the music of the poetry is only the…

And then, is there a higher æsthetic delight than to read poetry in a language which one does not quite thoroughly understand?

I drank in the sense and the music of every line of it, beginning with the very first verses of the ideally beautiful dedication, and soon knew full pages by heart.

He little knew the unfathomable joy that that small square book gave me.