"That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it; that will be the kind of government which they will have." - Henry David Thoreau

I am an anarchist!     I will not rule and also ruled I will not be. -- John Henry Mackay

Individual freedom, personal responsibility and mutual respect and cooperation between all people.

Anarchy is a mode of being, a manner of responding to conditions and relating to others... This isn't a utopian vision, or a program, or an ideal to serve; it's simply a way of proceeding, of approaching relationships, of dealing with problems now... - Fighting For Our Lives, A free paper, (online pdf), discusses, in simple language, what is anarchist in everyday life, and how those spheres of cooperation can be expanded.

Judge not, condemn not.
Be humble, loving, and merciful.

An it harm none, do as you will.

"Anarchism does not mean bloodshed; it does not mean robbery, arson, etc. These monstrosities are, on the contrary, the characteristic features of capitalism. Anarchism means peace and tranquility to all."
-- August Spies, Haymarket anarchist

Need a social organization? A political structure? - Anarcho Syndicalism -
The organisation of labor is in its essence the organisation of a new society. Every historical form of society is in its foundation a form of organisation of labor.

"Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both recreation and hope." -- Emma Goldman, American anarchist and feminist, 1869-1940
"I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck."
"'What I believe' is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect." -- Emma Goldman

WHAT IS ANARCHISM? excerpted from Peter Kropotkin's entry on anarchism in the Encyclopaedia Britannica's 11th edition [1910-11]

Civilization is not a reflection of human nature, but is rather a system of domination and exploitation by ruling elites. - Richard Moore, Escaping the Matrix, http://escapingthematrix.org/

"Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.... Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others." -- Emma Goldman, American anarchist and feminist, 1869-1940

"It is not possible to be in favor of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for all people." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I advocate revolutionary changes... an end to capitalist exploitation, the abolition of racist policies, the eradication of sexism and the elimination of political repression. If that is a crime, then I am totally guilty." -- Assata Shakur

"Anarchists are opposed to violence...The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. It is life based on the freedom of the individual, without the intervention of the police. For this reason we are enemies of capitalism, which depends on the protection of the police to force workers to allow themsleves to be exploited...We are therefore enemies of the State, which is the coercive, violent organization of society." -- Errico Malatesta, Umanita Nova, August, 25, 1921

"It is the belief that power corrupts, and that people become irresponsible in their exercise of it, that forms the basis for much of their [anarchists] criticism of political authority and centralised power. Power must be dispersed they say, not so much because everyone is always good, but because when power is concentrated some people tend to become extremely evil." -- John Clark, The Anarchist Moment

"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." -- Tacitus

"The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently." -- Gustav Landauer

"In the hands of a people whose education has been willfully neglected, the ballot is a cunning swindle benefitting only the united barons of industry, trade and property." -- Daniel Guérin

"Government cannot exist without the tacit consent of the populace. This consent is maintained by keeping people in ignorance of their real power. Voting is not an expression of power, but an admission of powerlessness, since it cannot do otherwise than reaffirm the governmnet's supposed legitimacy." -- Fred Woodworth, Anarchism

"The anarchists' electoral abstentionism implies not only a conception that is opposed to the principle of representation (which is totally rejected by anarchism), it implies above all an absolute lack of confidence in the State. And this distrust, which is instinctive in the working masses, is for the anarchists the result of their historical experience with the State and its function, which has, at all times and in all places, resulted in a selfish and exclusive protection of the ruling classes and their privileges. Anarchist abstentionism strips the State of the constitutional fraud with which it presents itself to the gullible as the true representative of the whole nation, and, in so doing, exposes its essential character as representative, procurer, and protector of the ruling classes." -- Luigi Galleani, The End of Anarchism?

If voting could change anything it'd be illegal!

"Educating Americans through the means of the library service could bring about a change of the political attitude quicker than any other method. The basis of communism and socialistic influence is education of the people." -- Rep. Harold Velde, former HUAC chair

"Organization, far from creating authority, is the only cure for it and the only means whereby each of us will get used to taking an active and conscious part in collective work, and cease being passive instruments in the hands of leaders." -- Errico Malatesta

"...ironically, perhaps, the best organised dissenters in the world today are anarchists, who are busily undermining capitalism while the rest of the left is still trying to form committees." -- Jeremy Hardy, The Guardian (UK)

"For every dollar the boss has and didn't work for, one of us worked for a dollar and didn't get it." -- Big Bill Haywood

"Charity is no substitute for justice withheld." -- Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo, 354-430

"I regard philanthropy as a tragic apology for wrong conditions." -- Helen Keller

"Slavery may change its form or its name--its essence remains the same. Its essence may be expressed in these words: to be a slave is to be forced to work for someone else, just as to be a master is to live on someone else's work. In antiquity...slaves were, in all honesty, called slaves. In the Middle Ages, they took the name of serfs; nowadays, they are called wage earners." -- Mikhail Bakunin, Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism

"Long before Lenin and Trotsky took power, the threat of 'Communism' and 'anarchism' had been regularly invoked by the business-government-press complex to justify the violent suppression of attempts by working people to organize and to gain elementary rights." -- Noam Chomsky MIT linguist and political philosopher Noam Chomsky has been called the most important intellectual of our time. Unfortunately this quality is what keeps the mass media from giving him the coverage which he richly deserves and we desperately need.
Noam's page at MIT

"Capitalism can no more be 'persuaded' to limit growth than a human being can be 'persuaded' to stop breathing. Attempts to 'green' capitalism, to make it 'ecological', are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth." -- Murray Bookchin

"What shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men [and women] in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses?..."
"How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." -- Henry David Thoreau

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself...
Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable." -- H.L. Mencken American Writer 1880-1956

Some of the Above quotes originally came from: http://a4a.mahost.org/

"I have never read Marx. Well, I read a few pages then decided he was a bore. Karl didn't invent the class struggle, he merely wrote about it in a way that impressed some people, using lots of big words. While it can certainly be useful to know about the history of the working class, you don't need to have studied Marxist theory to know that being bossed around is degrading." -- Dave Coull

Neither god nor master!

"I am a free prince ...
And this my conscience tells me; that there is no arguing with such sniveling puppies who allow superiors to kick them about the deck at pleasure, and pin their faith upon the pimp of a parson, a squab who neither practices nor believes what he puts upon the chuckle-headed fools he preaches to."
-- Black Sam Bellamy, pirate captain

From Why I Am Not A Christian, by Bertrand Russell:
"...You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion."
   "You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world." -- from Why I Am Not A Christian, by Bertrand Russell. Complette text can be found here: http://www.users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html and more on Russell can be found here: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/russell/index.html
If you don't care to read the entire essay, may I draw your attention to the last four sections; The Emotional Factor, How the Churches Have Retarded Progress, Fear - the Foundation of Religion, and, particularly the concluding section; What We Must Do...

What We Must Do

   "We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create."

How can you think freely in the shadow of a steeple?
or
Who needs a mind when you have a Bible?

There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.
-- Ruth Hurmence Green January 12, 1915 - July 7, 1981

We would be 1,500 years ahead if it hadn't been for the church dragging science back by its coattails and burning our best minds at the stake. -- Catherine Fahringer Born 1922

Censorship Timeline

excerpts from Mikhail Bakunin's God and the State

"The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has
made the world ugly and bad."-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Freedom From Religion Foundation

“Who burnt heretics? Who roasted or drowned millions of 'witches'? Who built dungeons and filled them? Who brought forth cries of agony from honest men and women that rang to the tingling stars? Who burnt Bruno? Who spat filth over the graves of Paine and Voltaire?
The answer is one word--CHRISTIANS.”
-- G.W. Foote. "Are Atheists Wicked?," chapter from Flowers of Freethought (1894)

It is impossible to exaggerate the evil work theology has done in the world.
(The Progress of Religious Ideas Through Successive Ages, 1855) Lydia Maria Child, February 11, 1802 - October 20, 1880, Abolitionist, author, anti-theologian

"...most people think that nothing but this wearying reality of ours is possible."
-- Nietzsche

There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.
(Wording for a monument to counter religious displays, 1995) -- Anne Nicol Gaylor Born November 25, 1926, Founder, Freedom From Religion Foundation

The Revolutionary Pleasure of
Thinking for Yourself

More reading;
Anarchy Archives - http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/

Anarchist Images - http://www.ipl.org/div/labadie/anarchism.html
ANARCHY FOR ANYBODY - http://a4a.mahost.org/
http://burn.ucsd.edu/~7Emai/a_graphics.html
Amnesty International - http://www.amnesty.org/

"Educating Americans through the means of the library service could bring about a change of the political attitude quicker than any other method." -- Rep. Harold Velde, former HUAC chair

"In all things it is a good idea to hang a question mark now and then on the things we have taken for granted." -- Bertrand Russell

"The first prerequisite for education is a willingness to sacrifice your prejudices on the alter of your spiritualgrowth." -- Louisah Teish

"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric."
-- Bertrand Russell

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell

"All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears." -- Alan C. Kay

Peace, friendship, the mutual and cooperative problem-solving
is the only road now open to the human species.

All Power To The People!

"There exists a law, not written down anywhere, but inborn in our hearts; a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading; a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays it down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right." -- Marcus Tulius Cicero (106-53 BC)

When injustice becomes law resistance becomes duty.

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
-- Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776

"At a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act"
-- George Orwell