Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

It was moderate in tone, but revolutionary in substance, and I did my best to write it in such a style that complicated historical and economical questions should be comprehensible to every intelligent worker.

The Russian political prisoners bore without murmuring all hardships inflicted upon them in Siberia, or through hard labour, but they were firmly decided not to tolerate corporal punishment.

Yet, although Hamlet is a sceptic, and disbelieves in Good, he does not disbelieve in Evil.

They search, they fall, but they rise again, and find it--and by right, too.

Of all novel-writers of our century, Turguéneff has certainly attained the greatest perfection as an artist, and his prose sounds to the Russian ear like music--music as deep as that of Beethoven.

There is a real chasm indeed between the conceptions which prevail in Russia upon marriage relations and those which prevail in France: amongst the workers as well as in the middle classes; and upon many other points there is almost the…

Upon me, and upon thousands of my contemporaries, this part of his teaching made an indelible impression, far more powerful than the best articles upon women’s rights.

He has shown what the Russian woman is, what treasuries of mind and heart she possesses, what she may be as an inspirer of men; and he has taught us how men who have a real claim to superiority look upon women, how they love.

If by his ‘Sportsman’s Notebook’ he rendered to Russia the immense service of throwing odium upon serfdom (I did not know at that time that he took a leading part in Hérzen’s powerful ‘Bell’), he has rendered no less service through his…

When a reaction has gained the upper hand, all visible traces of a movement disappear.

From the outset socialism took three independent lines of development, which found their expression in Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Robert Owen.

What an amount of wasted force, of bitter words exchanged and efforts divided, simply because those who have adopted the formula of ‘conquest of power within the existing states’ do not understand that activity in this direction cannot…

I saw that it must be treated by the same methods as natural sciences; not, however, on the slippery ground of mere analogies, such as Herbert Spencer accepts, but on the solid basis of induction applied to human institutions.

The structure of the society which we longed for was thus worked out, in theory and practice, from beneath, and the Jura Federation took a large part in that elaboration of the anarchist ideal.

We did not pretend to evolve an ideal commonwealth out of our theoretical views as to what a society ought to be, but we invited the workers to investigate the causes of the present evils, and in their discussions and congresses to…

The International Workingmen’s Association inaugurated a new method of solving the problems of practical sociology by appealing to the workers themselves.

Robert Owen and Fourier had given the world their ideals of a free, organically developing society, in opposition to the pyramidal ideals which had been copied from the Roman Empire or from the Roman Church.

Upon it all the progress of mankind is based, and so long as mankind does not begin to deteriorate physically and mentally, it will not be destroyed by any amount of criticism or of occasional revolt against it.

There is, in mankind, a nucleus of social habits, an inheritance from the past, not yet duly appreciated, which is not maintained by coercion and is superior to coercion.

We acted, in fact, in accordance with the old saying that freedom remains still the wisest cure for freedom’s temporary inconveniences.

But we trusted--and experience has proved that we were right--that social life itself, supported by a frank, open-minded criticism of opinions and actions, would be the most effective means for threshing out opinions and for divesting them…

For the very success of socialism, the ideas of no-government, of self-reliance, of free initiative of the individual--of anarchism, in a word--had thus to be preached side by side with those of socialized ownership and production.

The sentence which was put in the statutes of the International Association: ‘The emancipation of the workers must be accomplished by the workers themselves,’ had met with general sympathy and had taken root in minds.

Fifty years ago the workers were ready to sell their personal liberty to all sorts of rulers, and even to a Cæsar, in exchange for a promise of material well-being, but now this was no longer the case.

When I made a closer acquaintance with the working population and their sympathizers from the better educated classes, I soon realized that they valued their personal freedom even more than they valued their personal well-being.