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Quotes by Emma Goldman

Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.
– Emma Goldman
Crime is naught but misdirected energy.
– Emma Goldman
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.
– Emma Goldman
Free love? as if love is anything but free. Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love.
– Emma Goldman
Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.
– Emma Goldman
I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.
– Emma Goldman
Idealists are foolish enough to throw caution to the winds. They have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.
– Emma Goldman
If I can't dance, it's not my revolution!
– Emma Goldman
If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.
– Emma Goldman
If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
– Emma Goldman
In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, however, woman's premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, until death doth part.
– Emma Goldman
In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.
– Emma Goldman
It is essential that we realize once and for all that man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature. The former is inherent, the other is grafted on.
– Emma Goldman
It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.
– Emma Goldman
Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one's self-respect. For jealous people, like dope-fiends, stoop to the lowest level and in the end inspire only disgust and loathing.
– Emma Goldman
Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.
– Emma Goldman
Morality and its victim, the mother - what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?
– Emma Goldman
No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.
– Emma Goldman
No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
– Emma Goldman
No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution... revolution is but thought carried into action.
– Emma Goldman
On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.
– Emma Goldman
Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested - for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day.
– Emma Goldman
Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.
– Emma Goldman
Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name!
– Emma Goldman
Rather would I have the love songs of romantic ages, rather Don Juan and Madame Venus, rather an elopement by ladder and rope on a moonlight night, followed by the father's curse, mother's moans, and the moral comments of neighbors, than correctness and propriety measured by yardsticks.
– Emma Goldman
Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.
– Emma Goldman
Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.
– Emma Goldman
The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved.
– Emma Goldman
The higher mental development of woman, the less possible it is for her to meet a congenial male who will see in her, not only sex, but also the human being, the friend, the comrade and strong individuality, who cannot and ought not lose a single trait of her character.
– Emma Goldman
The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.
– Emma Goldman
The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.
– Emma Goldman
The most violent element in society is ignorance.
– Emma Goldman
The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.
– Emma Goldman
The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.
– Emma Goldman
The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being.
– Emma Goldman
Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage: Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.
– Emma Goldman
To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.
– Emma Goldman
When we can't dream any longer we die.
– Emma Goldman
The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.
– Emma Goldman
Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.
– Emma Goldman
There is no hope even that woman, with her right to vote, will ever purify politics.
– Emma Goldman
Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony.
– Emma Goldman
All claims of education notwithstanding, the pupil will accept only that which his mind craves.
– Emma Goldman