Voltairine de Cleyre

The Constitution was made chiefly because of the demands of Commerce.

There is not upon the face of the earth today a government so utterly and shamelessly corrupt as that of the United States of America. There are others more cruel, more tyrannical, more devastating; there is none so utterly venal.

The love of material ease has been, in the mass of men and permanently speaking, always greater than the love of liberty.

As to the essence of human nature, what our national experience has made plain is this, that to remain in a continually exalted moral condition is not human nature. That has happened which was prophesied: we have gone down hill from the …

We arrive at the point where we, looking over the hundred and twenty five years of independence, can see that the simple government conceived by the revolutionary republicans was a foredoomed failure. It was so because of: 1) the essence …

Private enterprise manages better all that to which it is equal. Anarchism declares that private enterprise, whether individual or cooperative, is equal to all the undertakings of society.

Though largely unsuccessful, it is to the measure of success they did achieve that we are indebted for such liberties as we do retain, and not to the general government.

Among the fundamental likeness between the Revolutionary Republicans and the Anarchists is the recognition that the little must precede the great; that the local must be the basis of the general; that there can be a free federation only …

Miss Goldman is a communist; I am an individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property, I wish to assert it.

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it.

Humanity can not be made equal by declarations on paper. Unless the material conditions for equality exist, it is worse than mockery to pronounce men equal. And unless there is equality (and by equality I mean equal chances for every one …

No one can hate petitions worse than I, and no one has less faith in them than I. But for my champion I am willing to try any means that invades no other's right, even though I have little hope in it.

I have my ideal, and it is very pure, and very sacred to me. But yours, equally sacred, may be different and we may both be wrong. But certain am I that with free contract, that form of sexual association will survive which is best adapted …

You will never get right until you start right.

Not for you to say "in this way shall the race love." Let the race alone. Will there not be atrocious crimes? Certainly. He is a fool who says there will not be.

Now for the remedy. It is in one word, the only word that ever brought equity anywhere — LIBERTY!

Look how your children grow up. Taught from their earliest infancy to curb their love natures — restrained at every turn!

In the name of Purity what lies are told! What queer morality it has engendered.

And yet, gentlemen, you expect your wives, the creatures you say you respect and love, to wear the longest skirts and the highest necked clothing, in order to conceal the obscene human body. There is no society for the prevention of …

This, then, is the tyranny of the State; it denies, to both woman and man, the right to earn a living, and grants it as a privilege to a favored few who for that favor must pay ninety per cent toll to the granters of it. These two things, …

When America passed the fugitive slave law compelling men to catch their fellows more brutally than runaway dogs, Canada, aristocratic, unrepublican Canada, still stretched her arms to those who might reach her. But there is no refuge upon …

He gave a concrete example of the effect of sex slavery, and for it he is imprisoned.

I would rather, much rather, be illegitimate according to the statutes of men, than illegitimate according to the unchanging law of Nature.

He looked, this obscenist looked with clear eyes into this ill-got thing you call morality, sealed with the seal of marriage, and saw in it the consummation of immorality, impurity, and injustice.