Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

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…

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

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…

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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…

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.

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!

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…

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.

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.

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…

The beauty of the style of Hérzen--of whom Turguéneff has truly said that he wrote in tears and blood, and that no other Russian had ever so written--the breadth of his ideas, and his deep love of Russia took possession of me, and I used…

I wrote my second number, still more vigorously insisting upon the necessity of uniting all forces in the name of liberty.

These outbreaks on the one side, and the profound aversion to serfdom which had grown up in the generation which came to the front with the advent of Alexander II. to the throne, rendered the emancipation of the peasants more and more…

No sooner had the news spread that the liberation long sighed for was coming than the insurrections nearly stopped.

It is most remarkable--so strong is the force of tradition--that the rumour went among the peasants that it was Napoleon III. who had required of the Tsar, in the treaty of peace, that the peasants should be freed.

There was no lack of young men amongst the nobility who earnestly worked for a frank abolition of the old servitude; but the serfdom party drew closer and closer round the emperor, and got power over his mind.

They whispered into his ears that the day serfdom was abolished the peasants would begin to kill the landlords wholesale, and Russia would witness a new Pugachóff uprising, far more terrible than that of 1773.

And the division and subdivision--the permanent subdivision--of functions has been pushed so far as to divide humanity into castes which are almost as firmly established as those of old India.