Peter Kropotkin - Quotes

From 1890:
'America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There, the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society. The peoples of the world are becoming profoundly dissatisfied and are not appeased by the promise of the social-democrats to patch up the State into a new engine of oppression.'

'But the inveterate enemies of thought - the government, the law-giver, the priest - soon recover from their defeat. By degrees they gather together their scattered forces, and remodel their faith and their code of laws to adapt them to the new needs.'

As for the impostor, Saint Darwin:
'As soon as we study animals - not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and in the mountains - we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species, or at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.
Of course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance of both these series of facts. But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: 'Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?' we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest.
They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development and bodily organization. If the numberless facts which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into account, we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle; but as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance, inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits and characters as ensure the maintenance and further development of the species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste of energy.'

'The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of  advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men and can be enforced on them only by terror.'

'The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.'