The Utopists won the battle. They proved that they were the really practical people, and that those who pretended to be practical were imbeciles. - Pyotr Kropotkin

Suppose that one of our great cities, so egotistic in ordinary times, were visited tomorrow by some calamity — a siege, for instance - that same selfish city would decide that the first needs to satisfy were those of the children and the aged. Without asking what services they had rendered, or were likely to render to society, it would first of all feed them. Then the combatants would be cared for, irrespective of the courage or the intelligence which each had displayed, and thousands of men and women would outvie each other in unselfish devotion to the wounded.

This tendency exists, and is felt as soon as the most pressing needs of each are satisfied, and in proportion as the productive power of the race increases. It becomes an active force every time a great idea comes to oust the mean preoccupations of everyday life.

How can we doubt, then, that when the instruments of production are placed at the service of all, when business is conducted on communist principles, when labour, having recovered its place of honour in society, produces much more than is necessary to all - how can we doubt that this force (already so powerful) will enlarge its sphere of action till it becomes the ruling principle of social life?

My brother could not write about trifles. Even in society he became animated only when some serious discussion was engaged in, and he complained of feeling 'a dull pain in the brain' — a physical pain, as he used to say — when he was with people who cared only for small talk.

Acknowledging, as a fact, the equal rights of all its members to the treasures accumulated in the past, it no longer recognizes a division between exploited and exploiters, governed and governors, dominated and dominators, and it seeks to establish a certain harmonious compatibility in its midst-not by subjecting all its members to an -authority that is fictitiously supposed to represent society, not by trying to establish uniformity, but by urging all men to develop free initiative, free action, free association. It seeks the most complete development of individuality combined with the highest development of voluntary association in all its aspects, in all possible degrees, for all imaginable aims; ever changing, ever modified associations which carry in themselves the elements of their durability and constantly assume new forms, which answer best to the multiple aspirations of all.