Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

Information of these horrors leaked out from the prisons, crossed the boundless distances of Siberia, and spread far and wide among the youth.

The horror of such strikes, during which men and women refused to take any food for seven or eight days in succession, and then lay motionless, their minds wandering, seemed not to appeal to the gendarmes.

Even those who were acquitted by the courts were banished by the gendarmes to little hamlets in Siberia and North-east Russia, where they had to starve on the government allowance of six shillings per month.

There were such cases as that of a girl who got nine years’ hard labour and life exile to Siberia, for giving one socialist pamphlet to a worker: that was all her crime.

Yet the sentences were ferocious--stupidly ferocious, because the movement, which had grown out of the previous state of Russia, was too deeply rooted to be crushed down by mere brutality.

In Russia, the struggle for freedom was taking a more and more acute character.

Contact with educated men of similar ways of thinking is what we anarchist writers, scattered by proscription all over the world, miss, perhaps, more than anything else.

In fact, I worked out here the foundation of nearly all that I have written later on.

Here, aided by my wife, with whom I used to discuss every event and every proposed paper, and who was a severe literary critic of my writings, I produced the best things that I wrote for ‘Le Révolté,’ among them the address ‘To the Young,’…

The result was that our penny and halfpenny pamphlets sold by the scores of thousands, and were reproduced in every other country in translations.

For a paper, as for everything else, men are of an infinitely greater value than money.

When our next number came out from our own Imprimerie Jurassienne, and we had told our difficulties and issued a couple of small pamphlets besides--all of us helping in the printing--the money came in, mostly in coppers and silver, but it…

For the workers and their publications the liberty of the Press inscribed in the Constitutions has many limitations beside the paragraphs of the law.

He was also one of the finest critics of the current socialist literature, and was never taken in by the mere display of fine words, or would-be science.

His appreciations of current events and men were so remarkable for their uncommon good sense that they were often prophetic.

As to the criticism of what exists, I went into it only to disentangle the roots of the evils, and to show that a deep-seated and carefully-nurtured fetishism with regard to the antiquated survivals of past phases of human development, and…

This was the method of thought with which I endeavoured to familiarize our readers--using plain comprehensible words, so as to accustom the most modest of them to judge for himself whereunto society is moving, and himself to correct the…

A correct social forecast cannot be made unless one keeps an eye on the thousands of signs of the new life, separating the occasional facts from those which are organically essential, and building the generalization upon that basis.

The greatest social philosophers have only caught the indications of coming changes, have understood their inner relations, and, aided by induction and intuition, have foretold what was to occur.

It is hope, not despair, which makes successful revolutions.

To make one feel in sympathy with the throbbing of the human heart all over the world, with its revolt against age-long injustice, with its attempts at working out new forms of life--this should be the chief duty of a revolutionary paper.

These symptoms should be watched, brought together in their intimate connection, and so grouped as to show to the hesitating minds of the greater number the invisible and often unconscious support which advanced ideas find everywhere, when…

I thought, on the contrary, that a revolutionary paper must be, above all, a record of those symptoms which everywhere announce the coming of a new era, the germination of new forms of social life, the growing revolt against antiquated…

To counterbalance that effect, the editor has to rely chiefly upon burning words, by means of which he tries to inspire his readers with energy and faith.

Socialist newspapers have often a tendency to become mere annals of complaints about existing conditions.