„Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich für frei hält, ohne es zu sein.“

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Die Wahlverwandtschaften
(Elective Affinities; Bk. II, Ch. 5)

“Anarchism is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order, as it has so often been called, since on principle it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts. It does not believe in any absolute truth, or in definite final goals for human development, but in an unlimited perfectibility of social arrangements and human living conditions, which are always straining after higher forms of expression, and to which for this reason one can assign no definite terminus nor set any fixed goal. The worst crime of any type of state is just that it always tries to force the rich diversity of social life into definite forms and adjust it to one particular form, which allows for no wider outlook and regards the previously exciting status as finished. The stronger its supporters feel themselves, the more completely they succeed in bringing every field of social life into their service, the more crippling is their influence on the operation of all creative cultural forces, the more unwholesomely does it affect the intellectual and social development of any particular epoch.”

— Rudolf Rocker,
Anarcho-Syndicalism (chapter 1)

“Anarchism recognises only the relative significance of ideas, institutions and social forms. It is therefore not a fixed, self-enclosed social system, but rather a definite trend in the historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to become broader and affect wider circles in more manifold ways. For the Anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account. The less this natural development of man is influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more will it become the measure of the society in which it has grown.”

— Rudolf Rocker,
Anarcho-Syndicalism (chapter 1)

Mutual influences of ideas and ideologies

“A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention; it must spring out of our personal need and defence. In every other case it is a source of danger. That which does not belong to our life menaces it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of ‘virtue,’ as Kant would have it, is pernicious. ‘Virtue,’ ‘duty,’ ‘good for its own sake,’ goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of universal validity – these are all chimeras, and in them one finds only an expression of the decay, the last collapse of life, the Chinese spirit of Königsberg. Quite the contrary is demanded by the most profound laws of self-preservation and of growth: to wit, that every man find his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. A nation goes to pieces when it confounds its duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every ‘impersonal’ duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction. – To think that no one has thought of Kant’s categorical imperative as dangerous to life!… The theological instinct alone took it under protection! – An action prompted by the life-instinct proves that it is a right action by the amount of pleasure that goes with it: and yet that Nihilist, with his bowels of Christian dogmatism, regarded pleasure as an objection.… What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure – as a mere automaton of ‘duty’? That is the recipe for décadence, and no less for idiocy.… Kant became an idiot. – And such a man was the contemporary of Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for the German philosopher – still passes today!… I forbid myself to say what I think of the Germans.… Didn’t Kant see in the French Revolution the transformation of the state from the inorganic form to the organic? Didn’t he ask himself if there was a single event that could be explained save on the assumption of a moral faculty in man, so that on the basis of it, ‘the tendency of mankind toward the good’ could be explained, once and for all time? Kant’s answer: ‘That is revolution.’ Instinct at fault in everything and anything, instinct as a revolt against nature, German décadence as a philosophy – that is Kant!”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (11)

Bourgeois individualism as an attempt to prevent solidarity

“Those feminists who weep crocodile tears over ‘exploited’ sex workers are doing nothing new. In the mid-nineteenth century, middle-class women in New York threatened to keep vigil outside brothels and to publish clients’ names. They attacked low wages as a cause of prostitution and advocated better employment opportunities for women (perhaps in domestic service, where they might provide free sexual favours to the men of the house, who could then stop frittering away the family wealth in houses of ill-repute). In England in 1858 the Female Mission on the Fallen distributed tracts on the streets at night and opened rescue homes. The latest campaigns in this vein target sex tourism and mail-order brides. The poverty of third-world women was never of prime feminist concern until they became afraid that too many ‘eligible’ western men would be wrested from their grasp. The feminist who seeks a mate in lonely-hearts columns has to maintain the self-deception that her aims are all to do with romance and nothing to do with financial gain.”

— Claudia, Fear of Pornography
(from Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures: The Challenge to Reclaim Feminism)

“It is remarkable how sudden feelings of empathy and identification with ‘exploited’ women surge up in the breasts of [liberal] feminists when they think of workers in the sex-industry — pornography is ‘an assault on women, our dignity, our humanness, our personal safety, even our right to survive as autonomous individuals’. It is even more remarkable how feminists never identify in this way with cleaners, child-minders and factory workers; that is, those ‘hidden’ women who create the material conditions that keep the feminist in the ‘alternative’ lifestyle to which she has become accustomed.”

— Claudia, Fear of Pornography

Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures: The Challenge to Reclaim Feminism (Alison Assiter and Avedon Carol, ed)

Shaming men for "being feminine" as an extension of misogyny

»„Tränenreiche Männer sind gut.“ Verlasse mich jeder, der trocknen Herzens, trockner Augen ist!«

“Men who give way easily to tears are good. I have nothing to do with those whose hearts are dry and whose eyes are dry!”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Die Wahlverwandtschaften
(Elective Affinities; Bk. I, Ch. 18)

“Carrying Coals to Newcastle. — The governments of the great States have two instruments for keeping the people dependent, in fear and obedience: a coarser, the army, and a more refined, the school. With the aid of the former they win over to their side the ambition of the higher strata and the strength of the lower, so far as both are characteristic of active and energetic men of moderate or inferior gifts. With the aid of the latter they win over gifted poverty, especially the intellectually pretentious semi-poverty of the middle classes.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human (Part II) (§1. 320)

School as a prison

“There are no Teachers. — As thinkers we ought only to speak of self-teaching. The instruction of the young by others is either an experiment performed upon something as yet unknown and unknowable, or else a thorough levelling process, in order to make the new member of society conform to the customs and manners that prevail for the time being. In both cases the result is accordingly unworthy of a thinker – the handiwork of parents and teachers, whom some valiantly honest person has called ‘nos ennemis naturels.’* One day, when, as the world thinks, we have long since finished our education, we discover ourselves. Then begins the task of the thinker, and then is the time to summon him to our aid – not as a teacher, but as a self-taught man who has experience.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human (Part II) (§2. 267)

* ‘our natural enemies’

„Der Umgang mit Frauen ist das Element guter Sitten.“

“Association with women is the basic element of good manners.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Die Wahlverwandtschaften
(Elective Affinities; Bk. II, Ch. 5)

“We know well that the word ‘anarchy’ is also used in current phraseology as synonymous with disorder. But that meaning of ‘anarchy,’ being a derived one, implies at least two suppositions. It implies, first, that wherever there is no government there is disorder; and it implies, moreover, that order, due to a strong government and a strong police, is always beneficial. Both implications, however, are anything but proved. There is plenty of order — we should say, of harmony — in many branches of human activity where the government, happily, does not interfere. As to the beneficial effects of order, the kind of order that reigned at Naples under the Bourbons surely was not preferable to some disorder started by Garibaldi; while the Protestants of this country will probably say that the good deal of disorder made by Luther was preferable, at any rate, to the order which reigned under the Pope. While all agree that harmony is always desirable, there is no such unanimity about order, and still less about the ‘order’ which is supposed to reign in our modern societies. So that we have no objection whatever to the use of the word ‘anarchy’ as a negation of what has been often described as order.”

Peter Kropotkin, Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles

Alpha loser masculinity, lack

The quote is from Mari Ruti's book Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings