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Reply to What dead person has most inspired you politically and why? by /u/ziq

6

ziq wrote

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms..

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.

All good things are wild and free.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.

I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace

Henry David Thoreau

Reply to What dead person has most inspired you politically and why? by /u/ziq

5

ziq wrote (edited )

So many able writers have shown that the unjust institutions which work so much misery and suffering to the masses have their root in governments, and owe their whole existence to the power derived from government we cannot help but believe that were every law, every title deed, every court, and every police officer or soldier abolished tomorrow with one sweep, we would be better off than now.

Can you not see that it is the INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM and not the boss which must be changed?

We must devastate the avenues where the wealthy live.

Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination.

Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.

Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.

We look away from government for relief, because we know that force (legalized) invades the personal liberty of man, seizes upon the natural elements and intervenes between man and natural laws; from this exercise of force through governments flows nearly all the misery, poverty, crime and confusion existing in society.

Oh, Misery, I have drunk thy cup of sorrow to its dregs, but I am still a rebel.

Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, 'Freedom.' Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully.

Strike not for a few cents more an hour, because the price of living will be raised faster still, but strike for all you earn, be content with nothing less.

Concentrated power can be always wielded in the interest of the few and at the expense of the many. Government in its last analysis is this power reduced to a science. Governments never lead; they follow progress. When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then.

Lucy Parsons

Reply to Anarchism Will Never Be Fashionable by /u/Pop

3

ziq wrote (edited )

Sure, violently opposing the rich isn't for everyone... but it can be. So long as you're not rich. Just takes some good propaganda.