63+ Peter Kropotkin Quotes On Education, Religion And Friendship

Peter Kropotkin was a Russian revolutionary who fought for anarchist and socialist ideals. He was a prominent figure in the anarchist movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, advocating for the abolishment of private property and the establishment of a stateless society. He wrote extensively on the topics of mutual aid and evolutionary theory, and is considered one of the most influential anarchist thinkers of all time. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Peter Kropotkin on education, religion, friendship.

Top 10 Peter Kropotkin Quotes

1. Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization
2. The hopeless don't revolt, because revolution is an act of hope.
3. Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor.
4. The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.
5. 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.
6. The two great movements of our century -- towards Liberty of the individual and social co-operation of the whole community -- are summed up in Anarchist-Communism.
7. As an anarchist, I cannot reconcile myself to any government.
8. You know how I always believe in the future. Without disorder, the revolution is impossible; knowing that, I did not lose hope, and I do not lose it now.
9. 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.
10. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle.

Peter Kropotkin Short Quotes

• War is the usual condition of Europe. A thirty years' supply of causes of war is always on hand.
• War is the usual condition of Europe.
• Poverty, the existence of the poor, was the first cause of riches.
• It is only those who do nothing who makes no mistake.
• Where there is authority, there is no freedom.
• Revolutions, we must remember, are always made by minorities.
• Idlers do not make history: they suffer it!
• Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state.
• The moral sense is a natural faculty in us like the sense of smell or of touch.
• When one has talent, everything contributes to its development.

Peter Kropotkin Quotes About Society

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

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 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

Educated men - "civilized," as Fourier used to say with disdain - tremble at the idea that society might some day be without judges, police, or gaolers. — 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

America is just the country that how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society. — Peter Kropotkin

Peter Kropotkin Famous Quotes And Sayings

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 centre to the periphery. — 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

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

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

Any revolutionary agitation exacts enormous sacrifices, not so much in terms of prison sentences and years of incarceration - which have been raining down by the hundreds of years annually - as in terms of the manifold personal sacrifices sustained by those who commit themselves to revolutionary agitation. — 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

Cleverly assorted scraps of spurious science are inculcated upon the children to prove necessity of law; obedience to the law is made a religion; moral goodness and the law of the masters are fused into one and the same divinity. The historical hero of the schoolroom is the man who obeys the law, and defends it against rebels. — 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

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

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

...do not the bewitching power of all studies lie in that they continually open up to us new, unsuspected horizons, not yet understood, which entice us to proceed further and further in the penetration of what appears at first sight only in vague outline? — Peter Kropotkin

The confused mass of rules of conduct called law, which has been bequeathed to us by slavery, serfdom, feudalism, and royalty, has taken the place of those stone monsters, before whom human victims used to be immolated, and whom slavish savages dared not even touch lest they should be slain by the thunderbolts of heaven. — 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

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

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

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

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

But times and tempers are changed. Rebels are everywhere to be found who no longer wish to obey the law without knowing whence it comes, what are its uses, and whither arises the obligation to submit to it, and the reverence with which it is encompassed. The rebels of our day are criticizing the very foundations of society which have hitherto been held sacred, and first and foremost amongst them that fetish, law. — Peter Kropotkin

In order that the revolution should be something more than a word, in order that the reaction should not lead us back tomorrow to the situation of yesterday, the conquest of today must be worth the trouble of defending; the poor of yesterday must be worth the trouble of defending; the poor of yesterday must not be poor tomorrow. — Peter Kropotkin

The education we all receive from the State, at school and after, has so warped our minds that the very notion of freedom ends up by being lost, and disguised in servitude. It is a sad sight to see those who believe themselves to be revolutionaries unleashing their hatred on the anarchist just because his views on freedom go beyond their petty and narrow concepts of freedom learned in the State school. — Peter Kropotkin

All is for all! If the man and the woman bear their fair share of work, they have a right to their fair share of all that is produced by all, and that share is enough to secure them well-being. No more of such vague formulas as "The Right to work," or "To each the whole result of his labour." What we proclaim is The Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All! — 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

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

Each individual is a cosmos of organs, each organ is a cosmos of cells, each cell is a cosmos of infinitely small ones; and in this complex world, the well-being of the whole depends entirely on the sum of well-being enjoyed by each of the least microscopic particles of organized matter. A whole revolution is thus produced in the philosophy of life. — Peter Kropotkin

Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. 'Read poetry,' he wrote: 'poetry makes men better.' How often, in my later life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better. — Peter Kropotkin

The whole aspect of the universe changes with this new conception. The idea of force governing the world, of pre-established law, preconceived harmony, disappears to make room for the harmony that Fourier had caught a glimpse of: the one which results from the disorderly and incoherent movements of numberless hosts of matter, each of which goes its own way and all of which hold each other in equilibrium. — 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

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

But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a moldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children? — 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

Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none. — Peter 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

The millions of laws which exist for the regulation of humanity appear upon investigation to be divided into three principal categories: protection of property, protection of persons, protection of government. And by analyzing each of these three categories, we arrive at the same logical and necessary conclusion: the uselessness and hurtfulness of law. — 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

You reason like the king, who, being sent across the frontier, called out, 'What will become of my poor subjects without me?' — Peter Kropotkin

The future cannot be legislated. All that can be done is to anticipate its most important movements and to clear the path for them. — Peter Kropotkin

Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin], your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold. — Peter Kropotkin

Life Lessons by Peter Kropotkin

1. Peter Kropotkin taught us the importance of mutual aid and cooperation as a way of achieving social progress, rather than relying on competition and individualism.
2. He argued that the most successful societies are those in which people work together for the common good, rather than pursuing their own interests.
3. He also encouraged people to think critically and to challenge authority, in order to create a more just and equitable society.