Cut off your anger and cast aside your resentful expressions. Do not be angry when others are different from us. All people have minds. And the mind of each person has its own preferences. When they consider something right, we consider the same thing wrong. When we consider something right, they consider the same thing wrong. We are not necessarily wise, and they are not necessarily fools. All of us are simply ordinary human beings. Who can set up absolutely correct criteria to judge right fr ...

Each member of the society is watching the others and is obliged to inform. Each belongs to all and all to each. They are all slaves and equal in their slavery. Slander and murder in extreme cases, but above all - equality. First, the level of education, science and talents is lowered. A high level of science and talents is accessible only to higher abilities - no need for higher abilities! Higher abilities have always seized power and become despots. Higher abilities cannot fail to be despots ...

The manner in which we live, and that in which we ought to live, are things so wide asunder, that he who quits the one to betake himself to the other is more likely to destroy than to save himself; since any one who would act up to a perfect standard of goodness in everything, must be ruined among so many who are not good.

The possessed character of our financial, industrial and political leaders, is psychologically evident from the very fact that they are at the mercy of a suprapersonal factor - work, power, money, or whatever they like to call it - which, in the telling phrase, consumes them and leaves them little or no room as private persons. Coupled with a nihilistic attitude towards civilization and humanity there goes a puffing up of the ego-sphere which expresses itself with b ...

The wretchedness of war and military preparation not only fail to comply with the reasons presented in their justification, but for the most part these reasons are so insignificant that they are unworthy of consideration and are quite unknown to those who die in war.

Those who are preoccupied with organizing the lives of others, be they monarchs, presidents and ministers, or spies and executioners, or members and leaders of a party, or dictators; these people manifest nothing worthy - as people seem to think - but, to the contrary, are pitiable, deeply misled people, preoccupied with a task that is not only vain and stupid, but is one of the most horrible things man can choose to do.

The belief that some people, the minority, can arrange the lives of the majority - a thing that is regarded as the most indisputable truth in the name of which the greatest crimes are committed - is only a superstition. The activity founded on this superstition, the political activities of the revolutionaries as well as the rulers and their assistants, generally regarded as the most honourable and important matter, is really a most futile, and moreover harmful, human occupation and has been an ...

The desires of an enlightened soul for the welfare of others is in no way satisfied by vainly organizing their lives through violence, but that it is only achieved through one's own inner work - the only thing where man has complete freedom and control. No activity aimed at the organization of other people's lives through coercion can enhance people's welfare, but is always a more or less consciously hypocritical deceit used to cover up men's basest desires: vanity, pride and s ...

Those in power say that without employing violence there can be no order, or decent life, meaning by the word 'order', that structure of life wherein the minority can indulge in excess through the labour of others, and by 'decent life', the lack of any impediment to leading such a life. However unjust what they say it is, one can see that they are able to speak thus because the suppression of violence would not only deprive them of the possibility of living in the way that they ...

When among one hundred men, one rules over ninety-nine, it is unjust, it is despotism; when ten rule over ninety, it is equally unjust, it is an oligarchy; but when fifty-one rule over forty-nine (and this is only theoretical, for in reality it is always ten or eleven of these fifty-one), it is entirely just, it is freedom! Could there be anything funnier, in its manifest absurdity, than such reasoning? And yet it is this very reasoning that serves as the basis for all reformers of the politic ...

Oppressors need not be meek and humble but, as emperors, kings, popes, bishops, and secular and spiritual authorities of any kind, they must correct others by teaching and punishing them while themselves living in splendour and luxury, the provision of which is an obligation for those they subject. Thanks to this false teaching which they whole-heartedly support, the ruling classes govern the people, forcing them to provide for the luxuries, vanities and vices of the rulers. Moreover, the scie ...

Luxury cannot be obtained other than by enslaving other people. As soon as there is slavery there is an increase in luxury, and the increase in luxury inevitably instigates an increase in slavery. It is only people who are hungry, cold and tied down by need who will spend their whole lives doing something they have no need of doing, but which is needed for the amusement of their masters.

To tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolutio ...

I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature, which are inevitably dualistic, full of subjects and objects and their relationship to one another; or with programs full of things for other people to do. I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning. Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality t ...

It's characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong. The majority's function in relation to the spirit is to try to listen and to open up to someone who's had an experience beyond that of food, shelter, progeny and wealth.