Murray Bookchin was an American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher.
Top 5 Murray Bookchin Quotes
I regard Marxism as the most sinister and the most subtle form of totalitarianism. ~ Murray Bookchin.
My main interests right now are to publish, to write, to explicate various views which I hope have an impact on thinking people. ~ Murray Bookchin.
I think it’s terribly important that networks of anarchists establish themselves with a view toward educating people. ~ Murray Bookchin.
I believe in a libertarian communist society. ~ Murray Bookchin.
I will never surrender the rights of the individual – the complete rights of the individual – to any “ism” whatever. ~ Murray Bookchin.
Powerful Murray Bookchin Quotes
It is impossible to achieve a harmonization of man and nature without creating a human community that lives in a lasting balance with its natural environment. ~ Murray Bookchin.
I believe that anarchists should agree to disagree but not to fight with each other. ~ Murray Bookchin.
I’m not sitting in judgment on whether or not libertarians can participate in a political process whose very nature they oppose. ~ Murray Bookchin.
City planning finds its validation in the intuitive recognition that a burgeoning market society can not be trusted to produce spontaneously a habitable, sanitary, or even efficient city, much less a beautiful one. ~ Murray Bookchin.
Thought-Provoking Murray Bookchin Quotes
The truth is that man has produced imbalances not only in nature but more fundamentally in his relations with his fellow man – in the very structure of his society. To state this thought more precisely: the imbalances man has produced in the natural world are caused by the imbalances he has produced in the social world. ~ Murray Bookchin.
I have been criticized for pointing out that anarchism is likely to flourish more easily, at least in the western world, and to a certain extent in eastern Europe, in those areas where there is either grim need or considerable technological development. ~ Murray Bookchin.
The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking. ~ Murray Bookchin.
If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable. ~ Murray Bookchin.
I believe that it’s terribly important to have a movement that is spiritual, not in the supernatural sense, but in the sense of German Geist, spirit, which combines the idea of mind together with feeling, together with intuition. ~ Murray Bookchin.
People are never free of trying to be content. ~ Murray Bookchin.
My communism attempts basically to create a shared society, that’s all; a shared society in which individuality will flourish, along with love, and along with mutual respect. ~ Murray Bookchin.
The only conclusion I could arrive at with the death of the workers’ movement as a revolutionary force – you know the imagery of the proletarian vanguard, or proletarian hegemony – has been the community. ~ Murray Bookchin.
Profound Murray Bookchin Quotes
I know one thing: that you can do a lot of things but if you don’t educate people into conscious anarchism it gets frittered away. ~ Murray Bookchin.
If we remain merely conflicting class beings, genders, ethnic beings, and nationalities, it is obvious that any kind of harmony between human beings will be impossible. As members of classes, genders, ethnic groups, and nationalities, we will have narrowed our meaning of what it is to be human by means of particularistic interests that explicitly set us against each other. ~ Murray Bookchin.
As long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organizes humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction. ~ Murray Bookchin.
There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things. ~ Murray Bookchin.
The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology. ~ Murray Bookchin.
I would not want to be in the same movement with an anarcho-syndicalist, however much I may respect and like that person. Some of my best friends are anarcho-syndicalists. I mean, I realize that we do not have a commonality, even a language, that makes it possible for us to communicate. ~ Murray Bookchin.
Our modern cities have become in large part agglomerations of bedroom apartments in which men and women spiritually wither away and their personalities become trivialized by the petty concerns of amusement, consumption, and small talk. ~ Murray Bookchin.
When I die Bookchinism comes to an end, and all the allusions to it both among Marxists and anarchists. ~ Murray Bookchin.
To speak of limits to growth under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. ~ Murray Bookchin.
Famous Murray Bookchin Quotes
I do have an intense respect for pacifists, because I believe that ultimately, if we are to have a truly humanistic as well as libertarian society, violence will have to be banished on this planet. ~ Murray Bookchin.
I am puzzled by people today who, after moralizing about the need for cooperation and goodwill and love-thy-neighbor-as-thyself, suddenly invoke the most primitive, barbarous motivations for any kind of progress. ~ Murray Bookchin.
An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles. ~ Murray Bookchin.
Capitalism is a social cancer. It has always been a social cancer. It is the disease of society. It is the malignancy of society. ~ Murray Bookchin.
I got deeply involved with the Trotskyists. I assumed simply that my enemy’s enemies were my friends. ~ Murray Bookchin.
Nearly a half century ago, while Social-Democratic and Communist theoreticians babbled about a society with work for all, the Dadaists, those magnificent madmen, demanded unemployment for everybody. ~ Murray Bookchin.
I’m by no means convinced that capitalism and the development of technology has made anarchism easier. ~ Murray Bookchin.
The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital. ~ Murray Bookchin.
Popular Murray Bookchin Quotes
Revolutionary liberation must be a self-liberation that reaches social dimensions, not “mass liberation” or “class liberation” behind which lurks the rule of an elite, a hierarchy and a state. ~ Murray Bookchin.
You see something very important is happening. Personality is being eaten out, and with that the idealism that always motivated an anarchist movement – the belief in something, the ideal that there is something worth fighting for. ~ Murray Bookchin.
Terms that are related to individuals like Marxist, or Hegelian, or Bakuninist, or Kropotkinist, are completely outside my intellectual and emotional horizon. I’m a follower of no one. ~ Murray Bookchin.
The phrase “consumer society” complements the description of the present social order as an industrial society. Needs are tailored by the mass media to create a public demand for utterly useless commodities, each carefully engineered to deteriorate after a predetermined period of time. The plundering of the human spirit by the marketplace is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital. ~ Murray Bookchin.
We must consciously create our own world, not according to mindless customs and destructive prejudices, but according to the canons of reason, reflection, and discourse that uniquely belong to our own species. ~ Murray Bookchin.
I regard individuality as the most precious trait we have, because without it there is no creativity, there is no consciousness, there is no rationality. There is nothing that could make me speak more strongly to this point. ~ Murray Bookchin.
Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution. ~ Murray Bookchin.
Best Murray Bookchin Quotes
Until we become the architects of a society that is truly free and ecological, it will always seem that when the human brain is not adaptive, it is more often destructive than creative. ~ Murray Bookchin.
I believe that the American people should defend themselves if any attempt is made to take over the government by coup d’etat, whether by the military or the Marxists or any people who profess to be anarchists. ~ Murray Bookchin.
My anarchism is frankly anarcho-communalism, and it’s eco-anarchism as well. And it’s not oriented toward the proletariat. ~ Murray Bookchin.
Peter Kropotkin described Anarchism as the extreme left wing of socialism – a view with which I completely agree. One of my deepest concerns today is that the libertarian socialist core will be eroded by fashionable, post- modernist, spiritualist, mystic individualism. ~ Murray Bookchin.
I believe that if we do have a commonality of beliefs we should clarify them, we should strengthen their coherence and we should also develop common projects that produce a lived community of relationships. ~ Murray Bookchin.
Anarchism is not only a stateless society but also a harmonized society that exposes man to the stimuli provided by both agrarian and urban life, to physical activity and mental activity, to unrepressed sensuality and self-directed spirituality, to communal solidarity and individual development, to regional uniqueness and worldwide brotherhood, to spontaneity and self-discipline, to the elimination of toil and the promotion of craftsmanship. ~ Murray Bookchin.
So these were the 47 top quotes about Murray Bookchin.
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