Peter Kropotkin quotes - page 3

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)
To attribute, therefore, the industrial progress of our century to the war of each against all which it has proclaimed, is to reason like the man who, knowing not the causes of rain, attributes it to the victim he has immolated before his clay idol. For industrial progress, as for each other conquest over nature, mutual aid and close intercourse certainly are, as they have been, much more advantageous than mutual struggle. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
Not only has a coercive system contributed and powerfully aided to create all the present economical, political and social evils, but it has given proof of its absolute impotence to raise the moral level of societies; it has not been even able to maintain it at the level it had already reached. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
It is especially in the domain of ethics that the dominating importance of the mutual-aid principle appears in full. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
The means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective property of the race. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
They see a race of law-makers legislating without knowing what their laws are about. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
The individual is quite a world of federations, a whole universe in himself. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
How was it that words, so often spoken and lost in the air like the empty chiming of bells, were changed into actions? The answer is easy. Action, the continuous action, ceaselessly renewed, of minorities brings about this transformation. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
As man does not live in a solitary state, habits and feeling develop within him which are useful for the preservation of society and the propagation of the race. Without social feelings and usages life in common would have been absolutely impossible. It is not law which has established them; they are anterior to all law. (Peter Kropotkin)
Such, also, are the revolutions of mankind. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
When a physiologist speaks now of the life of a plant or of an animal, he sees rather an agglomeration, a colony of millions of separate individuals than a personality one and indivisible. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
All human societies have passed through this primitive phase, and to this day a large proportion of mankind have no written law. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
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. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
Throughout the history of our civilization, two traditions, two opposing tendencies have confronted each other. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
Is not the court of a tribunal a school of ferocity? View quote
Peter Kropotkin
All this we see, and, therefore, instead of inanely repeating the old formula, "Respect the law," we say, "Despise law and all its Attributes!" View quote
Peter Kropotkin
The Christian church accepted the Roman law as its own, and as such - allied to the State - it became in history the most furious enemy of all semi-communist institutions, to which Christianity appealed at Its origin. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
Harmony thus appears as a temporary adjustment, established among all forces acting upon a given spot - a provisory adaptation; and that adjustment will only last under one condition: that of being continually modified; of representing every moment the resultant of all conflicting actions. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
After having fixed all their attention on the sun and the large planets, astronomers are beginning to study now the infinitely small ones that people the universe. And they discover that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are peopled and crossed in all imaginable directions by little swarms of matter, invisible, infinitely small when taken separately, but all-powerful in their numbers. (Peter Kropotkin)
The State idea means something quite different from the idea of government. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
They study the characteristics of law, and instead of perpetual growth corresponding to that of the human race, they find its distinctive trait to be immobility, a tendency to crystallize what should be modified and developed day by day. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
A society entering into possession of the social capital accumulated by the labor of preceding generations, organizing itself so as to make use of this capital in the interests of all, and constituting itself without reconstituting the power of the ruling minorities. It comprises in its midst an infinite variety of capacities, temperaments and individual energies: it excludes none. It even calls for struggles and contentions; because we know that periods of contests, so long as they were freely fought out, without the weight of constituted authority being thrown on the one side of the balance, were periods when human genius took its mightiest flight and achieved the greatest aims. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
We know well the means by which this association of the lord, priest, merchant, judge, soldier, and king founded its domination. It was by the annihilation of all free unions: of village communities, guilds, trades unions, fraternities, and mediæval cities. View quote
Peter Kropotkin