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
The most violent element in society is ignorance.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Ignorance
If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Love
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
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: Patriotism, Activism
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
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
The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.
—Emma Goldman
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
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 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
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
To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Fanaticism
The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather understand one another.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Forgiveness, Understanding
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
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
Crime is naught but misdirected energy.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Crime, Energy, Criminals
Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Politicians, Politics
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: Nationality, Nations, Nationalism, Nation
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
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
When we can’t dream any longer, we die.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Dreams, Vision, Forethought, Foresight
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
Rather would I have the love songs of romantic ages, rather Don Juan and Madame Venus, rather an elopement by ladder and rope on a moonlight night, followed by the father’s curse, mother’s moans, and the moral comments of neighbors, than correctness and propriety measured by yardsticks.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Romance
The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Reason
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
Patriotism is a menace to liberty.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Patriotism
The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Independence
I’d rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Flowers
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
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: Jealousy, Self Respect
Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Understanding
Idealists are foolish enough to throw caution to the winds. They have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Idealism, Ideals
The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Justice
It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Morality, Morals
The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Authority
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
Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name!
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Humanity, Human Nature
No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Law, Lawyers
People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.
—Emma Goldman
The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.
—Emma Goldman
Topics: Politicians, Politics
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