Author of quotes: Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

They elevated the “merciless” struggle for personal gain to the height of a principle, a law of all biology, to which a person must obey, otherwise he will perish in this world based on mutual destruction. Leaving aside the economists, who in the whole field of natural science usually know only a few current phrases, and then borrowed from minor popularizers, we must admit that even the most authoritative representatives of Darwin's views make every effort to support these false ideas.

I am not at all guided by love for the owner of a given house - whom I often do not know at all - when, seeing his house on fire, I grab a bucket of water and run to his house, even though I was not in the least afraid for my own: I am guided by a wider one, although a more indefinite feeling, or rather an instinct, of universal human solidarity, that is, mutual responsibility between all people, and cohabitation.

On the other hand, having become acquainted with the lecture "On the Law of Mutual Aid" delivered at the Congress of Russian Naturalists in January 1880 by Professor Kessler, the former Dean of St. Petersburg University, I saw that it sheds new light on the whole issue. According to Kessler, in addition to the law of Mutual Struggle, in nature there is also the law of "Mutual Aid", which plays a much more important role than the law of Mutual Struggle for the success of the struggle for life, and especially for the progressive evolution of species.

In all these cases, a feeling incomparably wider than love or personal sympathy plays the main role - here is the instinct of sociability, which slowly developed among animals and people during an extremely long period of evolution, from its earliest stages and which taught animals equally and people to be aware of the strength they acquire by practicing mutual help and support, and to be aware of the pleasures that can be found in social life.

History, as hitherto written, is almost entirely a description of the ways and means by which ecclesiastical power, military power, political autocracy, and later the wealthy classes, established and maintained their rule. The struggle between these forces is, in fact, the essence of history.

The very persistence of the gentile organization shows how false is the view that depicts primitive humanity as a disorderly agglomeration of individuals. Unbridled individualism is a phenomenon of modern times.

If Europeans had told a savage that extremely amiable people, attached to their children, live in Europe side by side with such shacks, where children die due to lack of food, then the savage would not understand them.

Of all the evils I have listed, perhaps the worst is the education that the state gives us both at school and in later life. State education so perverts our brain that the very concept of freedom in us disappears and is replaced by slave concepts.

The state, the patron of world-eating, the protector of predation, the defender of property based on the seizure of foreign land and labor of others!

The whole life of civilized people is full of conditional lies. People who hate each other, meeting on the street, depict the most blissful smiles on their faces.

I quickly realized that it was absolutely impossible for the people to do anything useful with the help of the administrative machine. With this illusion, I said goodbye forever.

The rate of human evolution in this direction completely depends on the integral of individual wills.

The main difference between an educated and an uneducated person is that the latter cannot follow the chain of inference.

Anarchy is a doctrine that strives for the complete liberation of man from the yoke of capital and the state.