Lucy Parsons Quotes

Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.

Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, "Freedom." Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully." — Lucy Parsons

Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.

Oh, working man! Oh, starved, outraged, and robbed laborer, how long will you lend attentive ear to the authors of your misery?

There is no power on earth so great as the power of intellect. It moves the world and it moves the earth.

It is the moving inspiration of our age, the only question worth struggling for: the question of how to lift humanity from poverty and despair.

we have made work disagreeable because we have allowed conditions to obtain which force us to continue to work after we are tired, or at something for which we have no taste, take no interest in and have no adaptability for. For this reason we lose pleasure in work and it becomes irksome to us;

Concentrated power can be always wielded in the interest of the few and at the expense of the many. Government in its last analysis is this power reduced to a science. Governments never lead; they follow progress. When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then.

The sooner men learn to make companions and equals of their wives and not subordinates, the sooner the marriage relation will be one of harmony.

The overseer’s whip is now fully supplanted by the lash of hunger! And the auction block by the chain-gang and convict cell

a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society

I hope even now to live to see the day when the first dawn of the new era of labor will have arisen, when capitalism will be a thing of the past, and the new industrial republic, the commonwealth of labor, shall be in operation.

Every person who is rendering no good to humanity is useless, no matter how hard they work. Head work and hand work are equally hard and equally useful if rightly applied. All people, rich and poor, are working at something; perhaps one at useful labor, the other at useless labor. Nevertheless they are each and all using their energies at some occupation.

are you not slaves to the money power as much as were the black slaves to the Southern slaveholders? Then we ask you again: What are you going to do about it? You had the ballot then. Could you have voted away black slavery? You know you could not because the slaveholders would not hear of such a thing for the same reason you can’t vote yourselves out of wage-slavery.

But the massive crackdown and Red scare that followed the Haymarket bombing broke the wave of labor defiance of the mid-1880s. Until Lucy Parsons’s death in 1942 at nearly ninety, she kept it up, galvanizing people to fight the “wage slavery” she found little better than the “chattel slavery” she had witnessed as a child, inspiring them to seek autonomy and human development as individuals, while joining together in new inclusive structures that made decisions democratically and shared ownership of key resources.

Unlike the recorded teachings of Jesus, however, anarchist ideology embraced the considered use of violence. Lucy Parsons avowed that had she been at Haymarket Square when the police arrived, had she seen their behavior and heard what transpired, she would have “flung the bomb [her]self.

There was a movement at one time, not so many years ago either, which was international in its scope, which had for its object the setting aside the first of May for a general, international holiday, looking ultimately to the inauguration of a short-hour workday, but this grand idea has been side-tracked in later years by a lot of political buncombe and claptrap, thus persuading the working classes into the notion that they can gain their freedom by electing a lot of fellows to office. (1906)

A reduction of the hours of labor to the point where all can have employment is worth a General Strike, because upon this point all efforts can be focused, and if carried, its beneficial effects would be felt immediately by the whole working class, men, women and children.

It is by the press we educate the public mind and link the people of most distant parts together in bonds of fraternity and comradeship. We can keep track of the work and accomplishments of our comrades in no other way, except by the medium of paper.

If the great body of the people have clamored for our comrades’ blood, it was because they believed what the lying monopolistic press has said.

When will the people see the real cause of all their woe—the private ownership of the means of life? When will the masses learn that property is theirs and theirs only who has produced it—earned it?

Let the masses understand that these robbers hold this property (which is so much unpaid labor) under the plea of the laws which they themselves [the robbers] have made, and by the sanction of the very men they have locked out to starve.

it is labor, and labor only, which makes civilization possible. ’Tis labor that toils, and spins, and weaves, and builds, that another, not it, may enjoy. ’Tis the laborers who dive into the unknown caverns of the sea and compel her to yield up her hidden treasures, which they know not even the value thereof.

when the proletariat, failing to see the justice of this bourgeois economy, begins to murmur, the policeman’s club is called into active service.

Now, what do we mean when we say revolutionary Socialist? We mean that the land shall belong to the landless, the tools to the toiler, and the products to the producers

Who, pray, are benefiting by all this waste and confusion? The few, a mere small percentage of the population of the world. All the remainder submit, because they think “it always has been so and it must always be so.” The work of those who have a conception of a true society of the future, must devote all their efforts toward disabusing the people’s minds of the ancient falsehoods. It can be done. Many other hoary lies have passed away, so will this one, too.

The selfish scheme called “property rights” has superseded human rights and created four times more useless work than is required to produce and distribute all the comforts and luxuries of life.

a “strike,” which means a resistance on the part of the oppressed toward the oppressor—a protest, as it were

This is the fate which awaits many of the middle class and the wage-class. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to serve notice on these thieves, and highway robbers, sitting in high places of “honor” and “trust,” that by the eternal god of justice, and by the manhood in you, that you will not, in this land of plenty, allow your children to become the mere hirelings and dependents upon the sweet will of their children?

Give them to understand that you will not stand patiently by and see your hard earnings squandered by a luxuriating class of idlers.

The anti-military spirit which is developing among the masses of Europe will tell the governments of the Earth that the workers have no trouble that needs to be settled by cruel war; and if the rulers have trouble, they can settle them by fighting it out among themselves. The working class wants to enjoy the fruits of their toil, the short time they journey this Earth. But we are told that kind of talk is unpatriotic, that every man ought to be willing to fight for his country. What country belongs to the wage class?

Never since the days of the Spartan Helots has history recorded such brutality as has been ever since the war and as is now being perpetrated upon the Negro in the South. How easy for us to go to Russia and drop a tear of sympathy over the persecuted Jew. But a step across Mason's and Dixon's line will bring us upon a scene of horrors before which those of Russia, bad as they are, pale into insignificance! No irresponsible, blood-thirsty mobs prowl over Russian territory, lashing and lynching its citizens.

It is becoming more and more apparent that in every way we are "governed best where we are governed least.

We have laws, jails, courts, armies, guns and armories enough to make saints of us all, if they were the true preventives of crime; but we know they do not prevent crime; that wickedness and depravity exist in spite of them, nay, increase as the struggle between classes grows fiercer, wealth greater and more powerful and poverty more gaunt and desperate.

It was during the great railroad strike of 1877 that i became interested in what is known as the 'Labor question

How many of the wage class, as a class, are there who can avoid obeying the commands of the master (employing) class, as a class? Not many, are there? Then are you not slaves to the money power as much as were the black slaves to the Southern slaveholders? Then we ask you again: What are you going to do about it? You had the ballot then. Could you have voted away black slavery? You know you could not because the slaveholders would not hear of such a thing for the same reason you can’t vote yourselves out of wage-slavery.

Ma conception de la grève du futur ne consiste pas à faire la grève et se laisser mourir de faim, mais de faire la grève et s'approprier la production