Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Quotes - Page 2

The idea of God is the type and foundation of the principle of authority and absolutism, which it is our task to destroy or at least to subordinate wherever it manifests itself.

All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism.

Anarchy, the absence of a master, of a sovereign.

Universal suffrage is counter-revolution.

If one were to ask. . ."What is slavery?" and I should answer in one word, "murder," my meaning would be understood at once. Why, then, to this other question: "What is property?" may I not likewise answer, "theft". . .?

Liberty, Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order.

Justice is a faculty that may be developed. This development is what constitutes the education of the human race.

All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in the words: agricultural-industrial federation. All my political ideas boil down to a similar formula: political federation or decentralization.

Producer and consumer are always one and the same person, merely considered from two different viewpoints.

Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak.

The law does not generate justice. The law is nothing but a declaration and application of what is just.

Of my private life I have nothing to say: it does not concern others. I have always had little liking for autobiographies and have no interest in anyone's affairs. History proper and novels hold no attractions for me except insofar as, I can discern there, as within our immortal Revolution, the adventures of the mind.

A common danger tends to concord. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In Communism, inequality comes from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence.

The faults of which we ask you [God] the remittance, it is you who make us commit them; the traps of which we implore you to deliver us, it is you who has set them for us; and the Satan which surrounds us, this Satan, it is you.

Does it seem to you impossible to imagine anything more inextricable than the social contract, when you think of the frightful number of relations that it must regulate -- something like squaring the circle, or finding perpetual motion? That is the reason why, wearied of the struggle, you fall back on absolutism and force.

Communism is a society where each one works according to his abilities and gets according to his needs.

The elements of justice are identical with those of algebra.

To name a thing is easy: the difficulty is to discern it before its appearance.

AXIOM. — Property is the Right of Increase claimed by the Proprietor over any thing which he has stamped as his own.

ANARCHY, or the government of each man by himself or as the English say, self -government.

As soon as I set foot in the parliamentary Sinai, I ceased to be in touch with the masses.

All men in their hearts, I say, bear witness to these truths; they need only to be made to understand it.

By no means. I have just given you my serious and well-considered profession of faith. Although a firm friend of order, I am (in the full force of the term) an anarchist. Listen to me.

Property is impossible.

Communism--the first expression of the social nature--is the first term of social development--the thesis; property, the reverse of communism, is the second term--the antithesis. When we have discovered the third term, the synthesis, we shall have the required solution.