Our social institutions are founded on certain ideas; as long as the latter are generally believed, the institutions built on them are safe. Governme… - Alexander Berkman

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Our social institutions are founded on certain ideas; as long as the latter are generally believed, the institutions built on them are safe. Government remains strong because people think political authority and legal compulsion necessary. Capitalism will continue as long as such an economic system is considered adequate and just. The weakening of the ideas which support the evil and oppressive present-day conditions means the ultimate breakdown of government and capitalism. Progress consists in abolishing what man has outlived and substituting in its place a more suitable environment.

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About Alexander Berkman

Alexander Berkman (November 21, 1870 – June 28, 1936) was a prominent Lithuanian Jewish anarchist, and a close associate of Emma Goldman. His adult life was largely spent in the United States, Germany and France.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Native Name: Александр Осипович Беркман
Alternative Names: Owsei Ossipowitsch Berkman Alexandre Berkman
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Additional quotes by Alexander Berkman

If you can see, hear, feel, and think, you should know that King Dollar rules the United States, and that the workers are robbed and exploited in this country to the heart's content of the masters.

If you are not deaf, dumb, and blind, then you know that the American bourgeois democracy and capitalistic civilization are the worst enemies of labor and progress, and that instead of protecting them, you should help to fight to destroy them.

You don’t question the right of the government to kill, to confiscate and imprison. If a private person should be guilty of the things the government is doing all the time, you’d brand him a murderer, thief and scoundrel. But as long as the violence committed is “lawful,” you approve of it and submit to it. So it is not really violence that you object to, but to people using violence “unlawfully.

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It is not the wrongs and crimes punishable by law that cause the greatest evil in the world. It is the lawful wrongs and unpunishable crimes, justified and protected by law and government, that fill the earth with misery and want, with strife and conflict, with class struggles, slaughter, and destruction.

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