Emma Goldman (1869–1940,) vilified as ‘Red Emma,’ was an American anarchist, feminist, essayist, and birth-control activist. A spokesperson for women’s freedom, she drew attention to American problems in civil liberties at the turn of the century.
Born in Kovno (now Kaunas,) Russian Empire, Goldman grew up in Lithuania, in Königsberg, and in St. Petersburg. Her Jewish family relocated to Russia but was forced to go to Germany to evade provincialism and anti-Semitism. In 1885, she immigrated to America, where she began a vigorous anarchist agitation against tyrannical employers. She was jailed in 1893 for incitement to riot in New York City.
Goldman founded and edited the feminist and anarchist monthly Mother Earth (1906–17) and became internationally identified for her rousing speeches and her visits to anarchist conclaves in Paris 1899 and Amsterdam 1907 She also worked extensively in American urban slums and she was imprisoned in 1917 for opposing government policy on conscription. She was deported to USSR for her history of provoking the deliberate use of violence to secure personal freedom.
Goldman returned to America in 1924 and later supported the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. Together with the sex educator Margaret Sanger, Goldman campaigned for women’s access to birth control.
Goldman’s publications include an autobiography, Living My Life (1931,) and Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) and My Disillusionment in Russia (1923.)
Theresa and Albert Moritz wrote the biography The World’s Most Dangerous Woman (2001.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Emma Goldman
Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man’s enslavement and all the horrors it entails.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Property
The most violent element in society is ignorance.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Ignorance
Patriotism … is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Activism, Patriotism
The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Dignity
Indeed, the keynote of government is injustice. With the arrogance and self-sufficiency of the King who could do no wrong, governments ordain, judge, condemn, and punish the most insignificant offenses, while maintaining themselves by the greatest of all offenses, the annihilation of individual liberty.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Government
Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one’s self-respect. For jealous people, like dope-fiends, stoop to the lowest level and in the end inspire only disgust and loathing.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Self Respect, Jealousy
Crime is naught but misdirected energy.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Criminals, Energy, Crime
When we can’t dream any longer, we die.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Forethought, Dreams, Foresight, Vision
The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Authority
Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Heaven
Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Effort
In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Nationalism, Nationality, Nation, Nations
In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, however, woman’s premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, “until death doth part.”
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Marriage
Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Politics, Politicians
Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Education
The higher mental development of woman, the less possible it is for her to meet a congenial male who will see in her, not only sex, but also the human being, the friend, the comrade and strong individuality, who cannot and ought not lose a single trait of her character.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Women
The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Humanity
Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only “order” that governments have ever maintained. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth…. Thus the entire arsenal of governments – laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons – is strenuously engaged in “harmonizing” the most antagonistic elements in society.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Justice
Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline, fear, or punishment, and without the pressure of poverty: a new social organism which will make an end to the terrible struggle for the means of existence,—the savage struggle which undermines the finest qualities in man, and ever widens the social abyss. In short, Anarchism strives towards a social organization which will establish well-being for all.
—Emma Goldman
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Paradise
Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government.
—Emma Goldman
I’d rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Flowers
Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Understanding
Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Marriage
No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Education, Kindness
The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.
—Emma Goldman
Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested—for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: People
Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Feminism, Women
The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather understand one another.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Understanding, Forgiveness
The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Independence
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