Quote of the day: Rudolf Rocker.

“Only freedom can inspire men to great things and bring about social and political transformations. The art of ruling men has never been the art of educating men and inspiring them to a new shaping of their lives.”

Lidt Rocker Citater

“A powerful state mechanism is the greatest hindrance to any higher cultural
development. Where the state has been attacked by internal decay, where the
influence of political power on the creative forces of society is reduced to a
minimum, there culture thrives best, for political rulership always strives for
uniformity and tends to subject every aspect of social life to its guardianship.
And in this it finds itself in inescapable contradiction to the creative
aspirations of cultural development, which is always on the quest after new
forms and fields of social activity, and for which freedom of expression, the
manysidedness and the kaleidoscopic changes of things, are just as vitally
necessary as rigid forms, dead rules and the forcible suppression of every
manifestation of social life which are in contradiction to it.
Every culture, if its natural development is not too much affected by political
restrictions, experiences a perpetual renewal of the formative urge, and out of
that comes an ever growing diversity of creative activity. Every successful
piece of work stirs the desire for greater perfection and deeper inspiration;
each new form becomes the herald of new possibilities of development. But the
state creates no culture, as is so often thoughtlessly asserted; it only tries
to keep things as they are, safely anchored to stereotypes. That has been the
reason for all revolutions in history.”

“Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of
life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is
dead dogma, its physical form brute force. And this unintelligence of its
objectives sets its stamp on its supporters also and renders them stupid and
brutal, even when they were originally endowed with the best of talents. One who
is constantly striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last
becomes a machine himself and loses all human feeling.”

“Only freedom can inspire men to great things and bring about social and political transformations. The art of ruling men has never been the art of educating men and inspiring them to a new shaping of their lives.”

“Every new social structure makes organs for itself in the body of the
old organism. Without this preliminary any social evolution is unthinkable. Even
revolutions can only develop and mature the germs which already exist and have
made their way into the consciousness of men; they cannot themselves create
these germs or create new worlds out of nothing. It therefore concerns us to
plant these germs while there is still yet time and bring them to the strongest
possible development, so as to make the task of the coming social revolution
easier and to ensure its permanence.”

Alle citater stammer fra Rudolf Rockers bog 'Anarcho-syndicalism'