Ross Winn

“ I am old-fashioned and orthodox to that extent—I believe in love. I believe in the beauty of family life, and in the reality of family ties. I would rather be the sole monarch of one true woman's heart than the temporary lover of a dozen Cleopatras, whose charms are mostly second-hand, and in whose love-caresses I may see the practiced art of the refined harlot. The family is the foundation of all refinement, of all morality, of all that is noble and pure in human character and thought ”

“ In childhood's golden days he was our faithful friend, and in manhood's maturer time we learned to appreciate the noble soul that yearned to have us always near him. He lived a pure and blameless life, and sowed the seed of happiness and joy in loving hearts that clustered about him in the home circle. And when his day was done, he fell asleep like a tired child, and calmly passed into the great beyond, when death, not terrible, but sorrowfully serene, drew gently the sable curtains of night upon his last repose and pinned them with the bright and shinning star of Hope. ”

“ There is not a "wrong" named in the conventional code that does not immediately become "right" the moment it is sanctioned by a pin-head officialdom. There is no crime so dark and damnable that it cannot by transformed into the sanctified and glorified achievement of a national virtue, if it be but covered by the painted folds of a national flag. A man who should take by armed force his neighbor's farm, butcher the helpless victim for defending his property, and apply the torch to everything in sight, would be denominated a brutal criminal, a hyena of infamy, a fiend of wanton wickedness. ”

“ Is not the present insane prejudice directed against the Anarchists a parallel of the experience of the early Christians? Does not the dominant power to-day view the Anarchists very much as the dominant power of Rome viewed the Christians? Are not the Anarchists charged with all crimes under heaven and relentlessly persecuted by authority? Yet they teach, as did Jesus, a doctrine of love and peace. Their very philosophy is the negation of violence—the antithesis of crime. ”

“ Plutocracy was never nearer the danger line than today. All this newspaper babble of prosperous times is bash that deceives no one. Facts stand forth everywhere in refutation. The army of unemployed is larger than it was last year, larger by thousands. Wages have not risen; but the necessities of life, food and clothing, are dearer. Poverty rolls its on-rushing tide closer each day to the homes of the masses, and destitution clutches in its skeleton grasp an ever-increasing host of fresh victims. Wealth is more proudly arrogant than ever. ”

“ Life is a strange blending of pleasure and pain, and the human race, taken as a whole, is full of incongruities and imperfections. Yet we are impelled constantly to seek better conditions, to strive for improvement, and in the midst of continued trials and defeats surrounded by a thousand limitations, and groping in the gloom of our intellectual obscurity, we struggle on toward the heights, believing that somewhere we will stand in the eternal light and grasp at last the crown of perfect happiness, and that for us will dawn the glories of a Golden Age. Man is naturally an idealist. ”

“ But in the course of human progress the people became more enlightened, and the divinity of kings as the basis of government had to go. But government itself remained, and under it the people were enslaved. But government—this monster of the ages—that has been guilty of every possible crime, has been compelled to change its garb, to put on a new mask, in order to keep the people in subjection, otherwise they would have rid themselves of it long ago. ”

“ He was the first president of the American congress. There was Jefferson, whose brain gave to humanity its title-deed to liberty in that matchless document, the Declaration of Independence. In human record Jefferson is a towering figure, and stands so high that somehow we feel that he is kin to the mountains—his character is like Mount Everest piercing the clouds until its majestic summit is lost to view and in its presence we feel that we are nothing. ”

“ In this day and generation of fashionable piety and $50,000 churches, genuine religion—religion warrented for everyday home use—is about as hard to find as a truthful newspaper editor. The woods are full of self-advertised saints the devil wouldn't have and anybody could buy in job lots, two dozen for a quarter. This fashionable church religion that promises humanity heavenly joys after it turns up its toes to the daisies and does nothing to abolish the sorrows of this world is a scintillating sham, and is as absolutely worthless as a political party platform. ”

“ A wise man will not rule—a good man cannot rule. "The man of virtuous soul commands not nor obeys." The free man will not be ruled. He may submit with his hands, but his soul is in eternal revolt. And the soul of man is the man.
The other day, in Brussels, King Leopold was fired upon three times by a man named Genarro Rubini, an Italian, who professed himself an Anarchist. Immediately there was a great outcry from the official class and from the newspapers for the suppression of Anarchism. It was urged that, because an Anarchist had attempted a crime all Anarchists should be punished for it. ”

“ I see a grand civilization dawning upon the world—a new heaven on a new earth, in which every man and woman shall be a sovereign with his or her own individuality for an empire; in which authority shall have no place, and in which national boundaries shall be blotted from the map and the flags of all nations shall be merged into the red emblem of universal brotherhood. ”

“ Is it not in its very nature antagonistic to freedom, and can we expect it to defend that which it destroys? For many centuries government has held sway, and liberty has been driven from among men. Let us give liberty control.
Liberty does not bring confusion, it brings peace. Under the government the nations are armed constantly for war. The state thrives on war and violence. Its chief prop is the sword. It lives only by violence. Take from it the power of its arms and it will die a natural death.
Let us have the co-operative commonwealth. ”

“ The religion of ghosts and gods is dying; the new religion of humanity is taking its seat, and has grasped the fallen scepter.
No king ever relinquished his crown without a struggle; and today the church, realizing its declining influence, and finding itself powerless to stay the resistless tide of advance thought, seeks to bulwark its crumbling prestige with the power of wealth and fashion; and is stretching out its hand to grasp the gilded scepter of worldly power. ”

“ Governmentalists, authoritarians, believers in force and violence—worshippers at the shrine of brute force, never tire of repeating the assertion that government is an absolute concomitant of civilization, and the only force whereby social order is to be upheld. However, even a very casual examination of the various forms of public thought reveals the surprising fact that there is an universal mistrust of government, and from nowhere do we hear a note of satisfaction with the workings of our political machinery. ”

“ The workers of the world could be its masters, and could achieve both their political and economic emancipation from capitalism by a peaceful refusal to be exploited. It is the wage-workers who are the most vitaly interested in the destruction of the capitalist system. The world-wide struggle in progress to-day, disguise it as we may, is a CLASS STRUGGLE. It is a conflict between the workers and the exploiters, between the slaves and the masters. ”

“ Hushed are their voices in the eternal silence of the grave, but the grand principles they taught, the great truths they told, still live. Amid the silence and solitude of the earth they sleep the sleep that knows no awakening. ”

“ Before the storm is the calm. Revolution is a storm usually preceded by a calm. Recently, great unrest and spasmodic agitation marked the social life of America. The wage workers suddenly appeared mutinous and even rebellious. Strikes became local insurrections; and the usual servility of the wage slaves seemed to give place to a species of daring, of sullen courage, born of desperation. The hideous phantoms of hunger stimulated the toilers to heroic acts of defiance, that alarmed their masters and paralyzed plutocracy's liveried lackeys of the political oligarchy. ”

“ The czar is therefore pushing Japan with a determination to carry the point or force Japan into war single handed and supported only by her own resources. The Russian leaders know that Japan is the barrier in the way of Russia's supremacy in the east, and that, sooner or later, Japan has got to be crushed. Now is the opportunity to do it, while Japan has no allied help. Then again the czar is menaced at home by the rising spirit of liberty, which threatens internal revolution. Better therefore to distract public attention by a foreign war than to face war at home. ”

“ For ages man has ruled with sword and bayonet, with bars and chains. For many centuries the strong hand of power has crushed the liberties of the people, has soaked the soil with human blood, has cast the sable shadow of oppression over the earth, and now are we not civilized enough to dispense with it forever? What blessings does government confer? ”

“ I see the grim specter of war fade forever from the scene and over all spread the white pinions of peace. I see the jails turned into workshops, courthouses into institutions of learning, and where once fell the awful shadow of the gallows, I see the flowers bloom. No more is heard the wild blast of war, and where once the earth trembled with the martial tread, I behold the peaceful artisan at his work.
Such is the great hope, the grand ideal, the sublime dream of Anarchy. ”

“ The dim eyes of liberty's devotees from many a foreign shore turned upon America, and a new hope was born. The infant republic became the model for the revolutionary movements then beginning to shake the old world. The oppressed of European despotism drew inspiration from the free nation of the west, and they began to suspect that kings and titled loafers were not a necessity. And every time the eyes of the subjects of a European monarchy rested upon the starry banner of free Columbia, there thrilled a desire for liberty. ”

“ The literature of romance has always flourished in that country and age where and when no great problems and revolutions occupied the public attention. But when a transition period appears, and the public mind is agitated with questions of social growth, either religious, political, or economic, we find always this tendency towards realism manifesting itself in the literature of every nation. As an example take the literature of China, a nation which has been stagnant for centuries; and her literature has less of realism and more of the romantic order, than that of any other people. ”

“ When we discover from whence we come, we shall know whither we go at death. If life is eternal, it is from everlasting to everlasting. If the soul of man survives the grave, it does not begin at birth. ”

“ In every city where there are any considerable number of Anarchists, some one of the European governments have their spies. Are the officials so stupidly ignorant of the character of the Anarchist movement as to believe that Anarchists engage in conspiracies? Not at all. They are terrified by the very absence of organization among Anarchists; they cannot comprehend that they are dealing only with an IDEA. Let the spies spy. They find only IDEAS. The conspiracy that confronts government is the conspiracy of thought. ”

“ Otherwise the church, as was said of the Bourbons, never learns anything and never forgets anything.
I have no fight against religion. Every human soul big enough to hold an ideal is religious. Every intelligent man has a religion. Religion itself is a good thing, but I am a little particular about the brand. I believe in the religion of deeds, as opposed to this Sunday morning, amen-corner, sanctimonious variety, that is peddled around by long-faced parsons trying to pulverize purgatory with their puril pulpit palaver. ”

“ Every revolution has been the work of a minority.
These are the two most firmly established facts of history.
Wherever reformers have gone into politics as a political party, they have become stagnantly conservative, and their efforts barren of result. Political action has extinguished the revolutionary spirit and character of Socialism in Europe and America. In return for this loss, Socialism is no nearer the goal of official power to-day than it was fifteen years ago. ”

“ The grafter is an ubiquitous personality fostered upon the moribund carcas of social order by the incubater of special privilege. Graft is a combination of gall and greed. The grafter is a gentleman of accommodating principles, whose chief aim in life is to annex himself to a good thing and the public be damned. His is the gentle art of jarring loose the unsuspecting jays from their tin, and his most self-assertive characteristic is a yearning to finger other people's cash. ”

“ The human mind is breaking the chains with which priestcraft sought to bind and enslave; and a new conscience is mounting the throne of the world's brain. The night of superstition and supernaturalism, of ghostly rule and priestly authority, is fading, and the day of human freedom is dawning. ”

“ The great world of that day was as indifferent to the doings of the common people, the toilers, as it is to-day. The birth of a prince was an affair of great moment—not because a prince was wiser, or better, or more noble than other men, but because he WAS a prince, the son of a king. ”

“ I believe that every man, woman and child should be free. But I do not believe in all the absurdities garbed and masked behind the word Anarchy, as expounded by many of its professed apostles. I do not believe that Anarchy stands for unorganized chaos, or that liberty leads to planless pandemonium. ”

“ Let man be FREE! The message rings,
And an echo answers back:
Uncrown all kings, unrobe all priests,
And clothe the unclothed back!
Then stand up, men, and demand your dues,
And fear not the tyrants' frown,
And do not bow at the shrine of his law,
Or reverence his legal gown.
But strike - if you would be free,
Oh slaves - if you would be free!
On! Do and dare! Be brave! Be FREE!
This work was published before January 1, 1928, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago. ”

“ There is England, the bully among nations, crushing ruthlessly with her gigantic armies, a handful of farmers who heroically battle for liberty and independence in South Africa. The United States is engaged in a wanton war of aggression and subjugation in the Philippines, continuing bloody Spain's infamous work; and yet these nations proudly boast of their preeminent rank as expounders of liberty, progress, Christianity and civilization. Falsehood, in a temple of brass, worshipped by the archhypocrites of cant. That is what I see everywhere in the world today. ”

“ Her sons were strong of arm and bold of heart, and with a dauntless spirit they broke the shackles of tyranny and erected in the wilderness an altar to fair Liberty, that all men might worship according to the dictates of their own conscience. They took the blue of heaven and the white of the milkyway and bound them with the rays of the sun, and made the American flag; and when they placed that banner in the sky, it became the flag of liberty, and carried to every shore and into every clime the message of freedom and human progress. ”

“ Today the masses have reached an intellectual development that makes the foundations of government extremely insecure. It is this general diffusion of knowledge among the people that results in the present universal agitation for governmental reforms. But, as an evil cannot be reformed, save by being destroyed, so all attempts to reform and improve the political state by substituting one set of rulers for another, or by changing its form, must always fail. ”

“ In the face of the evidence of its impotency, the claim of the church to be the evangel of divine will is an impudent absurdity. The church is purely a human institution. It is a structure of unstable clay, fashioned by the weak hand of human fallibility.
The church claims the credit for all that has been achieved by civilization, including civilization itself. But, as a matter of fact, the church has combatted every advance in civilization. It opposed every discovery of science. ”

“ This obituary for Kate Austin was published in Winn's Firebrand in 1902. Kate Austin, a noble and heroic woman, a fearless friend of freedom and humanity, a great intellect and a warm, true heart, is dead. Born and reared upon a farm, and among simple and everyday folk, her mind expanded and her mental sweep touched the distant worlds, and beheld the glories of the intellectual life. In the van of the army of progress there are a few fine and fearless souls who are endowed with the prophetic spirit—who see and feel the glory of the on-coming achievements of the race ”