Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

As things stand now in this country, we see that very large quantities of the commonest vegetables, each of which could be grown in this country, are imported.

I preferred to mention only well-established facts of intensive culture; but now it would be impossible not to mention what has been done in these two directions.

More than thirty years ago I mentioned in Nature the increase of the crops obtained by a Russian landlord who used to place at a certain height above his experimental field telegraph wires, through which an electric current was passed.

The fabricant gives the general indications as to the kind of stuff he desires to be woven, and his draughtsmen design the pattern, but it is the workman himself who must find the way to weave in threads of all colours the patterns…

The girls and boys are always happy to find an independent livelihood which emancipates them from the control of the family.

And, when they are grown up, they discover that they cannot maintain themselves at the low wages offered by the factory; but they can no more return to peasant life.

It is easy to see what havoc the factory is thus doing in the villages, and how unsettled is its very existence, based upon the very low wages offered to country girls.

It destroys the peasant home, it renders the life of the town worker still more precarious on account of the competition it makes to him; and the trade itself is in a perpetual state of unsettledness.

The letter she wrote to her mother a few hours before she went to the scaffold is one of the best expressions of a loving soul that a woman’s heart ever dictated.

But when I came to know more of him, I felt real love for his honest, frank nature, for his youthful energy and good sense, for his superior intelligence, simplicity, and truthfulness, and for his courage and tenacity.

He had read and thought a great deal, and upon the revolutionary character of the struggle which we had undertaken it appeared we had similar views.

I began to tell the peasant that he must not pay taxes, that the functionaries plunder the people, and I tried to convince him by quotations from the Bible that they must revolt.

The literature which could be published in Russia under a rigorous censorship--the faintest hint of socialism being prohibited--was soon found insufficient, and we started a printing office of our own abroad.

The books and pamphlets which were printed abroad were smuggled into Russia by thousands, stored at certain spots, and sent out to the local circles, which distributed them amongst the peasants and the workers.

An absolute sincerity, a general desire to settle the difficulties for the best, and a frankly expressed contempt for all that in the least degree approached theatrical affectation were quite sufficient.

If anyone of us had ventured to attempt oratorical effects by a speech, friendly jokes would have shown him at once that speech-making was out of place.

In a free country they would have been the habitual speakers at public meetings; but, like the privileged workers of the watch trade in Geneva, they treated the mass of the factory hands with a sort of contempt, and were in no haste to…

It was only after they had been arrested and kept three or four years in prison for having dared to think as socialists, and had sounded the full depth of Russian absolutism, that several of them developed into ardent propagandists…

My sympathies went especially toward the weavers and the workers in the cotton factories.

But underneath all the thrilling speeches, one note resounded: How could each of the speakers preserve his own personal well-being?

Yet no one had the courage to say, frankly and openly, that he was ready to do only that which would not endanger his own dovecote.

Sophisms--no end of sophisms--about the slowness of evolution, the inertia of the lower classes, the uselessness of sacrifice, were uttered to justify the unspoken words, all intermingled with assurances of each one’s willingness to make…

My comrade, who was known to the workers, simply introduced me: ‘Borodín, a friend.’ ‘Tell us, Borodín,’ he said, ‘what you have seen abroad.’ And I spoke of the labour movement in Western Europe, its struggles, its difficulties, and its…

The procureur blushed. ‘Would you have me believe,’ I continued, ‘that you, a practical man, did not notice that the two are written in quite different pencils?

Polakóff would have admitted everything concerning himself; but he would have preferred to be marched to Siberia rather than to involve another person.