I am not myself free or human until or unless I recognize the freedom and humanity of all my fellowmen... I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.

Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.

The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice.

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.

Nationality is not a universal human principle but an historical, local fact...Every nation, even a small one, has its own character, its own particular way of life and manner of speaking, feeling, thinking, and behaving. These distinctive features are the essence of nationality, the product of a nation's entire history and conditions of existence. Every nation, like every individual, is of necessity what it is, and has an unquestionable right to be itself. So-called national rights consist precisely of this.

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.