I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it.

The people are urged to be patriotic ... by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegience to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister.

Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty...

The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals.

What is generally regarded as success - acquisition of wealth, the capture of power or social prestige - I consider the most dismal failures. I hold when it is said of a man that he has arrived, it means that he is finished - his development has stopped at that point.

More pernicious than the power of a dictator is that of a class; the most terrible - the tyranny of a majority.

Yes, authority, coercion, and dependence rest on the mass, but never freedom or the free unfoldment of the individual, never the birth of a free society. The Socialist demagogues know that as well as I, but they maintain the myth of the virtues of the majority, because their very scheme of life means the perpetuation of power.