I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else; that is the … - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Formerly, the nobility and the clergy contributed towards the expenses of the State only by voluntary aid and gratuitous gift; their property could not be seized even for debt, — while the plebeian, overwhelmed by taxes and statute-labor, was continually tormented, now by the king’s tax-gatherers, now by those of the nobles and clergy. He whose possessions were subject to mortmain could neither bequeath nor inherit property; he was treated like the animals, whose services and offspring belong to their master by right of accession. The people wanted the conditions of ownership to be alike for all; they thought that every one should enjoy and freely dispose of his possessions his income and the fruit of his labor and industry. The people did not invent property; but as they had not the same privileges in regard to it, which the nobles and clergy possessed, they decreed that the right should be exercised by all under the same conditions. The more obnoxious forms of property — statute-labor, mortmain, maîtrise, and exclusion from public office — have disappeared; the conditions of its enjoyment have been modified: the principle still remains the same. There has been progress in the regulation of the right; there has been no revolution.

All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism.

Ontology, as a science of substances and causes, is impossible; We know beings only by their relations: however, as it is necessary, for the needs of science, to distinguish in each of its aspects this great whole that we call the UNIVERSE, we have given special names to things known and unknown, to the visible and invisible, to those that we know and that we believe.