“I make my war upon privilege & authority”

archives and elegies of philosophy, pride, and protest

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The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force.

- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

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I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.

- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.

- Ursula K. Le Guin (2007)

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The law of evolution is that the strongest survives! Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974)

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“And here let me emphasize the fact—and it cannot be repeated too often—that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.

Yours not to reason why; Yours but to do and die.”

- Eugene V. Debs, The Canton, Ohio Speech, Anti-War Speech (1918)

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It is this “upper class” which determines what kind of houses (if any at all) the producing class shall live in, the quantity and quality of food they shall place upon their table, the kind of raiment they shall wear, and whether the child of the proletariat shall in tender years enter the schoolhouse or the factory. And when the proletariat, failing to see the justice of this bourgeois economy, begins to murmur, the policeman’s club is called into active service for six days in the week, while on the seventh the minister assures him that to complain of the powers that be is quite sinful, besides being a losing game, inasmuch as by this action he is lessening his chance for obtaining a very comfortable apartment in “the mansions eternal in the skies.” And the possessing class meanwhile are perfectly willing to pay the minister handsomely, and furnish the proletariat all the credit necessary for this if he will furnish them the cash for the erection of their mansions here.

- Lucy E. Parsons, "Our Civilization: Is It Worth Saving?" (1885)

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Protesting against the superstition-breeding educational system, we nevertheless continue to subject our children to its baneful influence. We condemn the madness of war, yet we permit our offspring to be inculcated with the poison of patriotism. Ourselves more or less emancipated from false bourgeois standards, we still suffer our children to be corrupted by the hypocrisy of the established. Every such parent directly aids in the perpetuation of dominant ignorance and slavery. … they rear the ghost that will divide their house against itself, and strengthen the bulwarks of darkness.

- Alexander Berkman, "The Need of Translating Ideals Into Life" (1910)

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Man always hopes; Life always hopes. When a definite object cannot be outlined, the indomitable spirit of hope still impels the living mass to move toward something—something that shall somehow be better.

- Voltairine de Cleyre, "The Paris Commune" (c. 1910s)

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It is an American tradition that a standing army is a standing menace to liberty...It is American practice that we meddle with the affairs of everybody else from the West to the East Indies, from Russia to Japan... It is American tradition that the financial affairs of a nation should be transacted on the same principles of simple honesty that an individual conducts his own business... It is American practice that the general government should always have millions of debt.... It is American tradition that the Judiciary shall act as a check upon the impetuosity of Legislatures, should these attempt to pass the bounds of constitutional limitation. It is American practice that the Judiciary justifies every law which trenches on the liberties of the people and nullifies every act of the Legislature by which the people seek to regain some measure of their freedom.

- Voltairine de Cleyre, "Anarchism and American Traditions" (1909)

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At the end of life you may close your eyes, saying: “I have not been dominated by the Dominant Idea of my Age; I have chosen mine own allegiance, and served it. I have proved by a lifetime that there is that in man which saves him from the absolute tyranny of Circumstance, which in the end conquers and remoulds Circumstance,—the immortal fire of Individual Will, which is the salvation of the Future.

- Voltairine de Cleyre, "The Dominant Idea" (1910)

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I don't think hell will be full until all parties causing or favoring such conditions are there, for I don't like tyranny - I would like to see some way of doing away with this tyranny in its infancy, for I believe labor is worthy of its hire; if not, it should not be tolerated, as I believe any man or party not favoring honest wages for labor is not a good citizen, and if he is not a good citizen, he must be a tyrant.

- "General" Alexander Bradley, "The Great Coal Miners' Strike of 1897"

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The almost limitless capacity of Puritanism for evil is due to its intrenchment behind the State and the law. Pretending to safeguard the people against “immorality,” it has impregnated the machinery of government and added to its usurpation of moral guardianship the legal censorship of our views, feelings, and even of our conduct.

- Emma Goldman, "Anarchism and Other Essays" (1910)

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And equality is equity. By proclaiming ourselves anarchists, we proclaim beforehand that we disavow any way of treating others in which we should not like them to treat us; that we will no longer tolerate the inequality…

It is not only against the abstract trinity of law, religion, and authority that we declare war. By becoming anarchists we declare war against all this wave of deceit, cunning, exploitation, depravity, vice — in a word, inequality — which they have poured into all our hearts. We declare war against their way of acting, against their way of thinking. The governed, the deceived, the exploited, the prostitute, wound above all else our sense of equality. It is in the name of equality that we are determined to have no more prostituted, exploited, deceived and governed men and women.

- Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchist Morality” (1897)

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It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.

Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.

- Oscar Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1891)

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Why don't you run, when your feet are chained together? Why don't you cry out when a gag is on your lips? Why don't you raise your hands above your head when they are pinned fast to your sides? Why don't you spend thousands of dollars when you haven't a cent in your pocket? Why don't you go to the seashore or the mountains, you fools scorching with city heat?

If there is one thing more than another in this whole accursed tissue of false society, which makes me angry, it is the asinine stupidity which with the true phlegm of impenetrable dullness says, "Why don't the women leave!" Will you tell me where they will go and what they shall do? When the State, the legislators, has given to itself, the politicians, the utter and absolute control of the opportunity to live;…the proper prudes exclaim, "Why don't the women leave," they simply beggar the language of contempt.

…But there is no refuge upon earth for the enslaved sex. Right where we are, there we must dig our trenches, and win or die.

- Voltairine de Cleyre, “Sex Slavery - address to Unity Congregation” (1890)

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We now live under the pay system, in which if you can’t pay you can’t have. Everything has a price set upon it; earth, air, light and water, all have their price. And he who hasn’t worked, let him starve. Love, honor, fame, ambition, all the noblest and holiest aspirations and sentiments of humanity are bought and sold. Everything is upon the market for sale; all is merchandise and commerce…

…Free access to all the productive and distributive forces will alone free the minds and bodies of men. There are certain things that are priceless. Among these are life, liberty and happiness, and these are the things which the society of the future, the free society, will guarantee to all for the return of a few hours labor per day. When labor is no longer for sale, society will produce free men and women, who will think free, act free, and be free…

- Lucy E. Parsons, “What Freedom Means” (1905)

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- Vincent Van Gogh (c. 1882)