| "Anarchy isn't a political movement like socialism
which seeks administrative control of people's lives after some distant
event. While it similarly looks to a revolution in the future, anarchy
also implies a set of ethics and values we apply to our daily liveswhether
there are millions of us in a movement, as in the 1930s in Spain, or just
a solitary individual resisting the demands of the state to register for
the draft. Whether revolution or ruin awaits us, we still have to live
out our lives. it is better to do so in the tradition of the men and women
who sought a different world than to mimic a model citizen, the cheerful
robot, the lover of Big Brother."
A quote from the recent issue of *Fifth Estate* [4632 Second Ave., Detroit,
MI 48201 USA]-from E.B. Maple's excellent article on Somalia:
"Conscientious objection is objection not merely to military service but to all the demands and obligations imposed by our society: to taxes, to vaccination, to compulsory schooling etc." Jaques Ellul It is not enough for a handful of experts to attempt the solution of a problem, to solve it and then to apply it. The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment." Albert Einstein "All governments are equal in measure, good and evil. The best ideal is anrchy." Leo Tolstoy "Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!" Albert Einstein
"The pioneers of a warless world are the youth who refuse military service." Albert Einstein
"Nationalism is an infantile disease" Albert Einstein.
"The shadow of force, embedded in the law, stands behind every act of government, and in the end every government relies on soldiers and police to enFORCE its will. This ever-present and necessary threat of official violence in society helps keep the system operating, making ordinary business contracts enforceable, reducing crime, providing machinery for the peaceful settlement of disputes. In this paradoxical sense, it is the veiled threat of violence that helps make daily life nonviolent." Alvin Toffler 'Powershift' 1990
In the hands of a people whose education has been willfully neglected, the ballot is a cunning swindle benefitting only the united barons of industry, trade, and propety." Daniel Guerin
"In the issue of Freedom for 26th November we reported on the seizures of land by the peasants of Sicily and Southern Italy, which have since spread, even as far as the Po valley in the north. The Italian peasants have invaded the land after every war since the days of the Punic Wars of 264-164 B.C., and the present occupations are the culmination of a continuous series of sporadic and isolated seizures which have taken place since the last war. In fact, as Prime Minister de Gasperi admitted last week, by the end of 1947 375,000 acres had already been occupied, and for the period 1946-49 the total is 600,000 acres". Freedom, 24th December 1949 "My country is the world and my religion is to do good." Thomas Paine No revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression. If such a movement has caught hold of the imagination of the masses, they will seek a vent in song for the aspirations, the fears and hopes, the loves and hatreds engendered by the struggle. Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant, singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinct marks of a popular revolutionary movement; it is a dogma of the few, and not the faith of the multitude. James Connolly - Introduction to "Songs of Freedom", 1907 "What then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be an equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal, who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him, and who from that moment onward had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life." Albert Camus, writer, France. "When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist" Dom Helder Camara (Brazilian Bishop Nobel Peace Prize nominee) "Throughout the history of mankind there have been murderers and tyrants; and while it may seem momentarily that they have the upper hand, they have always fallen. Always." M.K. Gandhi, Lawyer, philosopher & peace activist. "They may torture me, break my bones, even kill me; then they will have my dead body, Not my obedience." M. Gandhi "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." George Orwell, "Notes on Nationalism,"1945 "Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats, We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. "You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice? [p.337, Helen Keller, 1911 letter to British suffragist] "[Sitting Bull] once told Annie Oakley, another one of the Wild West Show's stars, that he could not understand how white men could be so unmindful of their own poor. 'The white man knows how to make everything', he said, 'but he does not know how to distribute it.' from Dee Brown's 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee' All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Second it is violently opposed. Third it is accepted as being self-evident. Schopenhauer "The events of those years underlined what prisoners already sensed--that whatever crimes they had committed, the greatest crimes were being committed by the authorities who maintained the prisons, by the government of the United States. The law was being broken daily by the President, sending bombers to kill, sending men to be killed, outside the Constitution, outside the "highest law of the land." State and local officials were violating the civil rights of black people, which was against the law, and were not being prosecuted for it. [p.508, Howard Zinn, in reference to the US prison rebellions of the late sixties and early seventies] "Socialism means democracy. And that means elections, free speech and press, free political parties and labor unions -- things the Soviet people don't have. "In the Soviet Union, power has been centralized in the hands of a bureaucratic elite. Not only doesn't the Soviet Union deliver democracy to the Soviet people, but a highly centralized bureaucratic economy cannot meet even many of their basic economic needs. Just because the Soviet elites call their system "socialist" doesn't make it so. After all, they call it "democratic" too. [E.g. East Gernamy's former name, GDR, German Democratic Republic -HB]. "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible." Bertrand Russell, 'Marriage and Morals' p. 58 "Highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.... Most of them, I have no doubt, are kindly, law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it." George Orwell "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch." Anon Peace and the survival of life on earth as we know it are threatened by human activities that lack a commitment to humanitarian values. Destruction of nature and natural resources results from ignorance, greed and lack of respect for the earth's living things. Our ancestors viewed the earth as rich and bountiful, which it is. Many peo- ple in the past also saw nature as inex- haustibly sustainable, which we know is the case only if we care for it. It is not difficult to forgive destruction in the past that resulted from ignorance. Today, however, we have access to more information, and it is essential that we re-examine ethically what we have inherited, what we are responsible for, and what we will pass on to coming generations. clearly, this is a pivotal generation. Global communications is possible, yet confrontations take place more often than meaningful dialogue for peace. Our marvels of science and technol- ogy are matched, if not outweighed, by many current tragedies, including human starvation in some parts of the world and extinction of other life forms. Many of earth's habitats, animals and plants that we know as rare may not be known at all by future generations. We have the capability and the responsi- bility. We must act before it is too late. The Dalai Lama on the Environment [Quoted page 10, GreenPeace magazine March/April 1990 issue] The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say 'this is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared by someone who, uprooting the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow men; Beware of listening to this imposter! You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth itself to no one! 'Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men' (1755) Jean Jacques Rousseau "I am an anarchist! Wherefore I will not rule and also ruled I will not be." John Henry Mackay 'RIGHT', n. Legitimate authority to be, to do, or to have; as the right to be a king, the right to do one's neighbor, the right to have measles, and the like. The first of these rights was once universally believed to be derived directly from the will of God; and this is still sometimes affirmed 'in partibus infidelium' outside the enlightened realms of Democracy; as the well-known lines of Sir Abednego Bink, following: By what right, then, do royal rulers rule? Whose is the sanction of their state and pow'r? He surely were as stubborn as a mule Who, God unwilling, could maintain an hour His uninvited session on the throne, or air His pride securely in the Presidential chair. "the kinds of liberatory fantasies that surround new technologies are a powerful and persuasive means of social agency, ... their source to some extent lies in real popular needs and desires. Technoculture ... is located as much in the work of everyday fantasies and actions as at the level of corporate or military decision making. It is a mistake to dismiss such fantasies as false consciousness and such actions as compensatory bait, or to see their subjects as witless dupes of a smooth confidence trick. To deny the capacity of ordinary women and men to think of themselves as somehow in charge of even their most highly mediated environments is to cede any opportunity of making popular appeals for a more democratic kind of technoculture. More important is the task of re-creating a tradition of technoculture activism and practice that would be able to contest the pragmatic shape of these fantasies and everyday actions, rather than dismiss them as the sugary fare of the lotus-eating masses" 'Technoculture' edited by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross. (University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are rather forced upon them from without . . . they do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistence of the populace. Rudolf Rocker
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many of the quotes were obtained from the Zion Train also some
were submitted by ken.