Peter Kropotkin: It is often said that Anarchists live in a world of d...

Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization

Peter Kropotkin

competition law civilization

The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.

Peter Kropotkin

respect government law

The hopeless don't revolt, because revolution is an act of hope.

Peter Kropotkin

revolt hopeless revolution

Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor.

Peter Kropotkin

wealth poverty spring

Anarchy, when it works to destroy authority in all its aspects, when it demands the abrogation of laws and the abolition of the mechanism that serves to impose them, when it refuses all hierarchical organization and preaches free agreement - at the same time strives to maintain and enlarge the precious kernel of social customs without which no human or animal society can exist. Only, instead of demanding that those social customs should be maintained through the authority of a few, it demands it from the continued action of all.

Peter Kropotkin

agreement law animal

Where there is authority, there is no freedom.

Peter Kropotkin

heresy anarchy authority

America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.

Peter Kropotkin

freedom country america

Think about the world you want to live and work in. What do you need to know to build the world? Demand that your teachers teach you that.

Peter Kropotkin

wisdom teacher thinking

When we ask for the abolition of the State and its organs we are always told that we dream of a society composed of men better than they are in reality. But no; a thousand times, no. All we ask is that men should not be made worse than they are, by such institutions!

Peter Kropotkin

dream men reality

True progress lies in the direction of decentralization, both territorial and functional, in the development of the spirit of local and personal initiative, and of free federation from the simple to the compound, in lieu of the present hierarchy from the centre to the periphery.

Peter Kropotkin

progress simple lying

It is only those who do nothing who makes no mistake.

Peter Kropotkin

mistake

Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?

Peter Kropotkin

wall character men

Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown.

Peter Kropotkin

rights class men

Man is appealed to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at best tribal, but by his perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can re-trace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support- not mutual struggle- has had the leading part.

Peter Kropotkin

mutual-support struggle men

The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.

Peter Kropotkin

race men past

Poverty, the existence of the poor, was the first cause of riches.

Peter Kropotkin

riches causes firsts

Revolutions, we must remember, are always made by minorities.

Peter Kropotkin

minorities drug war

All is for all! If the man and the woman bear their fair share of work, they have a right to their fair share of all that is produced by all, and that share is enough to secure them well-being. No more of such vague formulas as "The Right to work," or "To each the whole result of his labour." What we proclaim is The Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All!

Peter Kropotkin

men world needs

The millions of laws which exist for the regulation of humanity appear upon investigation to be divided into three principal categories: protection of property, protection of persons, protection of government. And by analyzing each of these three categories, we arrive at the same logical and necessary conclusion: the uselessness and hurtfulness of law.

Peter Kropotkin

government humanity law

Struggle so that all may live this rich, overflowing life. And be sure that in this struggle you will find a joy greater than anything else can give.

Peter Kropotkin

struggle joy giving

It is often said that Anarchists live in a world of dreams to come, and do not see the things which happen today. We do see them only too well, and in their true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forest of prejudice that besets us.