We anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves.

Not whether we accomplish anarchism today, tomorrow, or within ten centuries, but that we walk towards anarchism today, tomorrow, and always.

Experience through freedom is the only means to arrive at the truth and the best solutions; and there is no freedom if there is not the freedom to be wrong.

If you say that you reject violence when it exceeds the limits imposed by the needs of defense, they accuse you of pacifism, without understanding that violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism, just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism.

The basic function of the government everywhere in all times, whatever title it adopts and whatever its origin and organisation may be, is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, of defending the oppressors and the exploiters: and it's principal, characteristic and indispensable instruments are the police agent and the tax-collector, the soldier and the gaoler - to whom must be invariably added the trader in lies, be he priest of schoolmaster, remunerated or protected by the government to enslave minds and make them docilely accept the yoke.

Intolerance of oppression, the desire to be free and develop one personality to its full limits, is not enough to make one an anarchist. That aspiration towards unlimited freedom, if not tempered by a love for mankind and by the desire that all should enjoy equal freedom, may well create rebels who soon become exploiters and tyrants.

The person who thinks with [their] own brain is to be preferred to the one who blindly approves everything.... Better an error consciously committed and in good faith, than a good action performed in a servile manner.