Emma Goldman Quotes

Biography
Type: Activist
Nationality: Lithuanian
Born: June 27, 1869
Died: May 14, 1940

All claims of education notwithstanding, the pupil will accept only that which his mind craves.
Emma Goldman

Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony.
Emma Goldman

Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.
Emma Goldman

Crime is naught but misdirected energy.
Emma Goldman

Direct action is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.
Emma Goldman

Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.
Emma Goldman

Free love? as if love is anything but free. Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love.
Emma Goldman

Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.
Emma Goldman

I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.
Emma Goldman

Idealists are foolish enough to throw caution to the winds. They have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.
Emma Goldman

Idealists foolish enough to throw caution to the winds have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.
Emma Goldman

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
Emma Goldman

If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.
Emma Goldman

If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
Emma Goldman

In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.
Emma Goldman

It is essential that we realize once and for all that man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature. The former is inherent, the other is grafted on.
Emma Goldman

Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.
Emma Goldman

Morality and its victim, the mother - what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?
Emma Goldman

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.
Emma Goldman

No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
Emma Goldman