Top 15 Emma Goldman Quotes

If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.

People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.

I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.

If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.

Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.

Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.

The most violent element in society is ignorance.

Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion and liberation of the human body from the coercion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. It stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals…

When we can't dream any longer we die.

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. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root.

Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.

The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.

Every society has the criminals it deserves.

Give us what belongs to us in peace, and if you don't give it to us in peace, we will take it by force.