“We are here to let in the light of Liberty upon political superstition.”

But there was no question in my mind that I was gonna still go for it. I was still going for the win.

It is neither more nor less than a paper representative of the bayonet, the bully, and the bullet.

War and Authority are companions; Peace and Liberty are companions.

Whoso knows what these two schools want and how they propose to get it understands the Socialistic movement.

First, then, State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice.

He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man,

We are here, on earth. Not one of us has any right to the earth.

In the matter of the maintenance and rearing of children the Anarchists would neither institute the communistic nursery which the State Socialists favor nor keep the communistic school system which now prevails.

It is because peaceful agitation and passive resistance are effective that I uphold them, and it is because force strengthens tyranny that I condemn it. War and Authority are companions.

This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will.

The moment that justice must be paid for by the victim of injustice it becomes itself injustice.

And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act, – at least in theory.

Is not the very beginning of privilege, monopoly and industrial slavery this erecting of the ballot-box above the individual?

The cost of justice can be justly paid only by the invader.

Man’s only right to land is his might over it. If his neighbor is mightier than he and takes the land from him, then the land is his neighbor’s, until the latter is dispossessed by one mightier still.

An Anarchist is anyone who denies the necessity and legitimacy of government; the question of his methods of attacking it is foreign to the definition.

I think it’s always dangerous to make political arguments in a religiously ideological way. And it’s very dangerous to treat as traitors to the American nation those who think differently.

The worst part of governing, the political side, is the grossest part, so that’s what they call it. So anything that reeks of that immediately gets tuned out by 70 percent of the population.

We lack a political culture, a culture of compromise. We in Poland, as well as the Hungarians, have never learned this sort of thing.

There’s such an aggressively a political movement in the US that anything that smells of being political – even the term “political” is so ridiculous, when you think about it.

The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.

How many really great writers are there who are totally non-political? You can hear the French Revolution in the poetry of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly and [John] Wordsworth

In Canada, the U.S. and most of Europe it may be easy to take political stands, this is something for which you can be forced to pay with your life, or your freedom, in many other parts of the world, from Iran to Russia to Pakistan to China.

Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.