“Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.”
"The Individual, Society and the State" (1940) http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1940/individual.htm
Context: Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most. His very "uniqueness," "separateness" and "differentiation" make him an alien, not only in his native place, but even in his own home. Often more so than the foreign born who generally falls in with the established.
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Emma Goldman 109
anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and sp… 1868–1940Related quotes
Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 6 (p. 27).
Speech, United States Senate (11 March 1850).
Context: It is true, indeed, that the national domain is ours. It is true that it was acquired by the valor and with the wealth of the whole nation. But we hold no arbitrary authority over it. We hold no arbitrary authority over anything, whether lawfully acquired or seized by usurpation. The constitution regulates our stewardship; the constitution devotes the domain to union, to justice, to defense, to welfare and to liberty.
But there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes.
Striking down the "Take-Title" provision of the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments Act in New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992).
Man in the Modern Age (1933)
Context: The general fellowship of our human situation has been rendered even more dubious than before, inasmuch as, though the old ties of caste have been loosened, a new restriction of the individual to some prescribed status in society is manifest. Less than ever, perhaps, is it possible for a man to transcend the limitations imposed by his social origins.<!-- p. 29
A Manual on the Dissemination of Material (1955).
Page 112
Other writings, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921)
As quoted in The Philosophy of Bakunin (1953) edited by G. P. Maximoff, p. 158<!-- (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press) -->
Context: Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations. Thus the individual, his freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa: society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the higher, the more fully the individual is developed, the greater his freedom — and the more he is the product of society, the more does he receive from society and the greater his debt to it.
