The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.
Peter KropotkinRead
Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor.
Interpretation
Wealth is often derived from the exploitation of the less fortunate.
This quote highlights the socio-economic dynamics where the resources and advantages enjoyed by the wealthy often come at the expense of the poor. It suggests that societal structures are such that the enrichment of one class frequently results from the impoverishment of another, prompting a reflection on equity and justice in wealth distribution.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech addressing income inequality.
The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.
Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?
Man is appealed to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at best tribal, but by his perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can re-trace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support- not mutual struggle- has had the leading part.
It is only by the abolition of the State, by the conquest of perfect liberty by the individual, by free agreement, association, and absolute free federation that we can reach Communism β the possession in common of our social inheritance, and the production in common of all riches.
When we ask for the abolition of the State and its organs we are always told that we dream of a society composed of men better than they are in reality. But no; a thousand times, no. All we ask is that men should not be made worse than they are, by such institutions!
No evolution is accomplished in nature without revolution. Periods of very slow changes are succeeded by periods of violent changes. Revolutions are as necessary for evolution as the slow changes which prepare them and succeed them.
People who exploit others come to spend an enormous amount of energy wondering about and justifying that exploitation.
God removes the sin of the one who makes humble confession, and thereby the devil loses the sovereignty he had gained over the human heart.
And now each night, I count the stars. And each night I get the same number. And when the stars won't come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.
If I didn't care about doing right and didn't feel uncomfortable doing wrong, I should get on capitally.
The essence of America lies not in the headlined heroes...but in the everyday folks who live and die unknown, yet leave their dreams as legacies
Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don't see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millepedes - "with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other," says Billy Pilgrim.
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