Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

The Jura Federation, at the time when I came to Switzerland, was the centre and the leading voice of the international federations.

His gift of taking a difficult economic or political question, and, after much thought about it, considering it from the working-man’s point of view, without divesting it of its deepest meaning, was wonderful.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Occasionally some grey-bearded Chartist would rise from the audience and tell us that all we were saying had been said forty years before, and was greeted then with enthusiasm by crowds of workers, but that now all was dead, and there was…

Perhaps he was right; but when, less than three years later, he started ‘Justice,’ it found a hearty support among the workers, and early in 1886 there were three socialist papers, and the Social Democratic Federation was an influential…

While I was at London, in 1882, I was also told one day that a man who pretended to be a bonâ fide agent of the Russian government, and could prove it, wanted to enter into negotiations with me. ‘Tell him that if he comes to my house I…

The fiction is that the law punishes the man by inflicting upon him a variety of physical and degrading hardships.

Altogether, the central prison at Clairvaux may be described as one of the best prisons in Europe.

When he was set free he had not a soul in the world to whom he might go to spend his old age. ‘Who will care to employ me?’ he said. ‘And what trade have I?

Physically and mentally he is rendered less and less prepared for sustained effort; and if he has had formerly a dislike for regular work, this dislike is only the more increased during his prison years.

On the contrary, in the immense, overwhelming majority of cases, they exercise upon them the most deteriorating effect.

He feels that even during his imprisonment he remains not quite an inactive part of the stream of human progress which spreads and strengthens the ideas which are dear to him.

If he had made the same efforts to observe people who hang about the law courts--detectives, spies, small solicitors, informers, people preying upon simpletons, and the like--he would have probably concluded that his ‘criminal type’ has a…

I never saw such a collection of faces of the lowest human type, sunk far below the average type of mankind, as I saw by the score round and within the Palais de Justice at Lyons.

Precious lives lost, and whole families wrecked, simply to get an easy living for such swindlers.

And this army of villains is not only limited to those who play the spy on revolutionists or to the military espionage system.

And while people feel scandalized at the espionage villainies lately revealed in the highest military spheres of France, they do not notice that amongst themselves, perhaps under their own roofs, the same and even worse things are being…

In the eyes of the Russian government, to love a brother who is persecuted for his political opinions is in itself a sin.

To maintain relations with him after he has become a refugee is a crime.

In the most unproductive Sologne, irrigation has increased the hay crop from two tons per hectare (two and a half acres) to eight tons; in the Vendée, from four tons of bad hay to ten tons of excellent hay.

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.