Peter Kropotkin was a scientist and a materialist, and he viewed human nature through that perspective.
Best Peter Kropotkin Quotes
War is the usual condition of Europe. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
The hopeless don’t revolt, because revolution is an act of hope. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
It is only those who do nothing who makes no mistake. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Idlers do not make history: they suffer it! ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Shoddy pay – shoddy work! ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Where there is authority, there is no freedom. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
I understand regicide as a means of obtaining vengeance for the ruin of our lives, but regicide as a means of obtaining political freedom I could never understand. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Be strong. Overflow with emotional and intellectual energy, and you will spread your intelligence, your love, your energy of action broadcast among others! This is what all moral teaching comes to. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Have not prisons – which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe – always been universities of crime? ~ Peter Kropotkin.
In the long run the practice of solidarity proves much more advantageous to the species than the development of individuals endowed with predatory inclinations. ~ Pyotr Kropotkin.
A national movement, which does not include in its platform the demand for an economical change advantageous to the masses has no chance of success unless supported by foreign aid. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Top Peter Kropotkin Quotes
When we have but the will to do it, that very moment will Justice be done: that very instant the tyrants of the Earth shall bite the dust. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Letters and science will only take their proper place in the work of human development when, freed from all mercenary bondage, they will be exclusively cultivated by those who love them, and for those who love them. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
He objected, though, to indiscriminate reading. ‘One must have some question,’ he wrote, ’addressed to the book one is going to read. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Think about the world you want to live and work in. What do you need to know to build the world? Demand that your teachers teach you that. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
If you want to know the people of a nation, I am sure you can judge a great deal more about them from their cooking and eating traditions than you can from the words and actions of their public officials. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Of all parties I now see only one party- The Anarchist- which respects human life, and loudly insists upon the abolition of capital punishment, prison torture and punishment of man by man altogether. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
While in the course of ages the nucleus of social custom inscribed in law has been subjected to but slight and gradual modifications, the other portion has been largely developed in directions indicated by the interests of the dominant classes, and to the injury of the classes they oppress. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
In fact, we know full well today that it is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists. ~ Pyotr Kropotkin.
Educated men – civilized, as Fourier used to say with disdain – tremble at the idea that society might someday be without judges, police, or gaolers. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Popular Peter Kropotkin Quotes
Struggle so that all may live this rich, overflowing life. And be sure that in this struggle you will find a joy greater than anything else can give. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
The State is only one of the forms assumed by society in the course of history. Why then make no distinction between what is permanent and what is accidental? ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Revolutions, we must remember, are always made by minorities. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Waste of time is the leading feature of our present education. Not only are we taught a mass of rubbish, but what is not rubbish is taught so as to make us waste over it as much time as possible. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Poverty, the existence of the poor, was the first cause of riches. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
We take men for what they are worth – and that is why we hate the government of man by man, and that we work with all our might – perhaps not strong enough – to put an end to it. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Powerful Peter Kropotkin Quotes
The most important economy, the only reasonable one, is to make life pleasant for all, because the man who is satisfied with his life produces infinitely more than the man who curses his surroundings. ~ Pyotr Kropotkin.
The moral sense is a natural faculty in us like the sense of smell or of touch. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
The species in which peace and mutual support are the rule, prosper, while the unsociable species decay. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Don’t compete! – competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it! ~ Pyotr Kropotkin.
It is not difficult, indeed, to see the absurdity of naming a few men and saying to them, “Make laws regulating all our spheres of activity, although not one of you knows anything about them! ~ Pyotr Kropotkin.
All this we see, and, therefore, instead of inanely repeating the old formula, Respect the law, we say, Despise law and all its Attributes! In place of the cowardly phrase, Obey the law, our cry, is Revolt against all laws! ~ Peter Kropotkin.
As an anarchist, I cannot reconcile myself to any government. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Famous Peter Kropotkin Quotes
The two great movements of our century – towards Liberty of the individual and social cooperation of the whole community – are summed up in Anarchist-Communism. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
My brother could not write about trifles. Even in society he became animated only when some serious discussion was engaged in, and he complained of feeling ‘a dull pain in the brain’ – a physical pain, as he used to say – when he was with people who cared only for small talk. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
True progress lies in the direction of decentralization, both territorial and functional, in the development of the spirit of local and personal initiative, and of free federation from the simple to the compound, in lieu of the present hierarchy from the center to the periphery. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
It is often said that Anarchists live in a world of dreams to come, and do not see the things which happen today. We do see them only too well, and in their true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forest of prejudice that besets us. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
It is only by the abolition of the State, by the conquest of perfect liberty by the individual, by free agreement, association, and absolute free federation that we can reach Communism – the possession in common of our social inheritance, and the production in common of all riches. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Wise Peter Kropotkin Quotes
Men passionately desire to live after death, but they often pass away without noticing the fact that the memory of a really good person always lives. It is impressed upon the next generation, and is transmitted again to the children. Is that not an immortality worth striving for? ~ Peter Kropotkin.
When one has talent, everything contributes to its development. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
You reason like the king, who, being sent across the frontier, called out, ‘What will become of my poor subjects without me?’ ~ Peter Kropotkin.
No evolution is accomplished in nature without revolution. Periods of very slow changes are succeeded by periods of violent changes. Revolutions are as necessary for evolution as the slow changes which prepare them and succeed them. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
When we ask for the abolition of the State and its organs we are always told that we dream of a society composed of men better than they are in reality. But no; a thousand times, no. All we ask is that men should not be made worse than they are, by such institutions! ~ Peter Kropotkin.
Variety is life; uniformity is death. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
The immense and ever increasing sums which the state wrings from the people are never enough for it; it mortgages the income of future generations, and steers resolutely toward bankruptcy. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. ~ Peter Kropotkin.
So these were 54 top Peter Kropotkin Quotes from the Russian Philosopher.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Virgil Thomson quotes and Justin Timberlake quotes.
