Various

“ The beginning of modern industry found the producer in abject slavery and without the understanding of an organized form of resistance. Exploitation reigned supreme, ever seeking to sap the last drop of strength of its victims. No mercy for the common man, nor any consideration shown for his life, his health, growth and development. Capitalism's only aim was the accumulation of profits, of wealth and power, and to this moloch everything else was ruthlessly sacrificed.
This spirit of accumulation did not admit of the right of the masses to think, feel, or demand ”

“ Our whole social fabric, our boasted civilization rests on the foundations of a lie, a most gigantic lie—the religious, political and economic lie, a triune lie, from whose fertile womb has issued a world of corruption, evils, shams and unnameable crimes. There, denuded of its tinsel trappings, your civilization stands revealed in all the evil reality of its unadorned shame; and 'tis a ghastly sight, a mass of corruption, an ever-spreading cancer. Your false civilization is a disease, and capitalism is its most malignant form ”

“ There lies a curse upon them, because they have not got the better of it: they have incorporated sickness, old age and contradiction into all their instincts—they have created no God since! Two millenniums almost, and not a single new God! But still continuing, and as if persisting by right, as an ultimatum and maximum of the God-shaping force, of the creator spiritus in man, this pitiable God of Christian monotono-theism! This hybrid image of ruin, derived from nullity, concept and contradiction in which all décadence instincts, all cowardices and lassitudes of soul have their sanction! ”

“ Nay, they have raised the contempt of manual labor to the height of a theory. "The man of science," they say, "must discover the laws of nature, the civil engineer must apply them, and the worker must execute in steel or wood, in iron or stone, the patterns devised by the engineer. He must work with machines invented for him, not by him. No matter if he does not understand them and cannot improve them: the scientific man and the scientific engineer will take care of the progress of science and industry." ”

“ Distress does not permit man to think.... And nevertheless! frightful! the edifice of knowledge towers aloft, heaven-storming, dawning on the Gods,—what to do!—The old God contrives war, he separates the peoples, he brings it about that men mutually annihilate one another (the priests have always had need of war ...) . [19] War, among other things, a great disturber of science!—Incredible! Knowledge, the emancipation from the priest, augments even in spite of wars.—And a final resolution is arrived at by the old God: "man has become scientific,—there is no help for it, he must be drowned!" ”

“ The worker whose task has been specialized by the permanent division of labor has lost the intellectual interest in his labor, and it is especially so in the great industries: he has lost his inventive powers. Formerly, he invented very much. Manual workers [23] —not men of science nor trained engineers—have invented, or brought to perfection, the prime motors and all that mass of machinery which has revolutionized industry for the last hundred years. But since the great factory has been enthroned, the worker, depressed by the monotony of his work, invents no more. ”

“ Woman was the second mistake of God.—"Woman is in her essence a serpent, Hera"—every priest knows that: "from woman comes all the mischief in the world"—every priest knows that likewise. Consequently, science also comes from her.... Only through woman did man learn to taste of the tree of knowledge.—What had happened? The old God was seized by a mortal terror. Man himself had become his greatest mistake, he had created a rival, science makes godlike; it is at an end with priests and Gods, if man becomes scientific!—Moral: science is the thing forbidden in itself—it alone is forbidden. ”

“ Rudolph von Jhering, one of the most distinguished theoreticians of jurisprudence in Europe, wrote, many years ago, "The way in which one utilizes his wealth is the best criterion of his character and degree of culture. The purpose that prompts the investment of his money is the safest characterization of him. The accounts of expenditures speak louder of a man's true nature than his diary." How well these words apply to the richest of the rich and to their methods of disposing of their capital!
Take philanthropy, for instance, with its loud and common display. ”

“ The so-called division of labor has grown under a system which condemned the masses to toil all the day long, and all the life long, at the same wearisome kind of labor. But if we take into account how few are the real producers of wealth in our present society, and how squandered is their labor, we must recognize that Franklin was right in saying that to work five hours a day would generally do for supplying each member of a civilized nation with the comfort now accessible for the few only, provided everybody took his due share in production. ”

“ Your twentieth-century civilization is fitly characterized by the fact that, paradoxical as it may seem, the more we produce, the less we have, and the richer we get, the poorer we are. Your pseudo-civilization is of that quality which defeats its own ends, so that notwithstanding the prodigious mechanical aids we possess in the production of all forms of wealth, the struggle for existence is more savage, more ferocious to-day than it has been ever since the dawn of our civilization. ”

“ This alone is morality.—"Thou shalt not know:"—the rest follows therefrom.—By his mortal terror God was not prevented from being shrewd. How does one defend one's self against science? That was for a long time his main problem. Answer: away with man, out of paradise! Happiness and leisure lead to thoughts,—all thoughts are bad thoughts.... Man shall not think—and the "priest in himself" contrives distress, death, the danger of life in pregnancy, every kind of misery, old age, weariness, and above all sickness,—nothing but expedients in the struggle against science! ”

“ Condemned to pasture in the lean meadows of capitalistic economy, trade-unionism drags on a miserable existence, satisfied with the crumbs that fall from the heavily laden tables of their lordly masters.
True social science has amply proved the futility of a reconciliation between the two opposing forces; the existence of the one force representing possession, wealth and power inevitably has a paralyzing effect upon its opposing force—Labor. ”

“ When young they have been manual workers, and some of them continue to be; but, owing to some happy circumstances, they have succeeded in acquiring some scientific knowledge, and thus they have combined science with handicraft. Surely there are such men; happily enough there is a nucleus of men who have escaped the so-much-advocated specialization of labor, and it is precisely to them that industry owes its chief recent inventions. ”

“ He loved that true naturalness which, when most real, requires no effort.
The most severe critic of Ibsen and his art was Ibsen himself. His attitude towards himself in his last work, "When We Dead Awaken," is that of the most unprejudiced judge.
What is the result?
We long for life; yet we are eternally chasing will-o'-the-wisps. We sacrifice ourselves for things which rob us of our Self. The castles we build prove houses made of cards, upon the first touch falling down. Instead of living, we philosophize. Our life is an esthetic counterfeit. ”

“ Everything is sham and hypocrisy, and hidden daggers are everywhere, in one form or another. These daggers are concealed under kindness, charity, benevolence, morality, law, and are, therefore, difficult to deal with. The blades are thrust into the back; you can feel them, but you cannot grapple with them.
Our inherent cruelty is best illustrated in the treatment we give those who are absolutely in our power—little children and the dumb animals. With what authority do we elicit respect and obedience from our little people! ”

“ But the day has come when, if all signs do not fail, spring is here, and a thousand and one buds of promise are pushing toward the light, when a wider and saner understanding of motherhood and marriage is at hand. ”

“ The Christian concept of God—God as God of the sick, God as cobweb-spinner, God as spirit—is one of the most corrupt concepts of God ever arrived at on earth; it represents perhaps the gauge of low water in the descending development of the God-type. God degenerated to the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and its eternal yea! In God, hostility announced to life, to nature, to the will to life! ”

“ Liberty under the law was also the liberty of our Southern chattel slaves before as well as after the war. Liberty under the law is the same old idea of liberty which every tyrant has ever advanced. As for myself, I shouldn't object to a little liberty in spite of the law, when that does not conform to the rule of liberty as laid down by Herbert Spencer in these words: "Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man." ”

“ I can find no improvement in the twentieth-century society over that of the nineteenth, and in truth, it is not capable of any real improvement, for this society is the product of a civilization so self-contradictory in its essential qualities, so stupendously absurd in its results, that the more we advance in this would-be civilization the less rational, the less human we become. ”

“ We maintain that in the interests of both science and industry, as well as of society as a whole, every human being, without distinction of birth, ought to receive such an education as would enable him, or her, to combine a thorough knowledge of science with a thorough knowledge of handicraft. We fully recognize the necessity of specialization of knowledge, but we maintain that specialization must follow general education, and that general education must be given in science and handicraft alike. ”

“ This notion is still in vogue to-day, and if the conditions of the workers at this moment are somewhat better, somewhat more endurable, it is not thanks to the milk of human kindness of the money power. Whatsoever the workingmen have achieved in the way of better human conditions,—a higher standard of living, or a partial recognition of their rights,—they have wrenched from their enemies through a hard and bitter struggle that required great endurance, tremendous courage and many sacrifices. ”

“ A person makes for himself a morality, a virtue, a sanctity out of this erroneous perspective towards all things, he unites the good conscience to the false mode of seeing,—he demands that no other mode of perspective be any longer of value, after he has made his own sacrosanct with the names of "God," "salvation," and "eternity." I have digged out the theologist-instinct everywhere; it is the most diffused, the most peculiarly subterranean form of falsity that exists on earth. What a theologian feels as true, must needs be false: one has therein almost a criterion of truth. ”

“ A mind of great depth, a soul of prophetic vision has passed away; yet not without leaving its powerful impress—for Henrik Ibsen stood upon the heights, and from their loftiest peaks we beheld, with him, the heavy fogs of the present, and through the rifts we saw the bright rays of a new sun, the promise of the dawn of a freer, stronger Humanity. ”

“ Surely all thoughtful men should study these theories of social redemption and learn why their advocates claim that putting them in practice would modify or abolish the evils of our modern conditions.
"The masters, lords and rulers of all lands," the thinkers and workers of our time must speedily give themselves to the understanding and application of some adequate remedy, or there will be blood, woe and tears almost without end, "when this dumb terror shall reply to God, after the silence of the centuries." ”

“ All methods, all presuppositions of our present-day science, have for millenniums been held in the most profound contempt: by reason of them a person was excluded from intercourse with "honest" men—he passed for an "enemy of God," a despiser of truth, a "possessed" person. As a scientific man, a person was a Chandala.... We have had the entire pathos of mankind against us—their concept of that which truth ought to be, which the service of truth ought to be: every "thou shalt" has been hitherto directed against us. ”

“ To turn our attention towards the child, to encourage the development of its initiative, to impress it with a sentiment of its dignity, to preserve it from cowardice and falsehood, to make it observe the pros and cons of all social conceptions, to educate it for the struggle, that is the great work, scarcely yet begun, which awaits us. ”

“ Under the pretext of division of labor, we have sharply separated the brain worker from the manual worker. The masses of the workmen do not receive more scientific education than their grandfathers did; but they have been deprived of the education of even the small workshop, while their boys and girls are driven into a mine or a factory from the age of thirteen, and there they soon forget the little they may have learned at school. As to the men of science, they despise manual labor. ”

“ It is for the most part a tale of the abattoirs, those unspeakable survivals in our Christendom in which man reeks his savage and sensual will on the lesser animals; and indirectly it is a story of the moral abattoirs of politics, economics, society, religion and the home, where the victims are of the species human, and where man's inhumanity to man is as selfish and relentless as his age-long cruelty to his brothers and sisters just behind him in the great procession. ”

“ Such tactics are not worth a single drop of sweat of the workingmen, since they are not only contradictory to the basic principles of trade unionism, but even useless and impractical.
Pity for and indignation against the workers fill one's soul at the spectacle of the ridiculous strike methods so often employed and that as often frustrate the possible success of every large labor war. ”

“ No travelers ever return, the poets say, from the Land of Shades beyond the river Styx—and may be it is a good thing for them that they don't—but you can see that there is an occasional exception even to that rule, for I have just returned from a hell, the like of which, for human brutality and fiendish barbarity, is not to be found even in the fire-and-brimstone creeds of our loving Christians. ”

“ To give such an education that, on leaving school at the age of eighteen or twenty, each boy and each girl should be endowed with a thorough knowledge of science—such a knowledge as might enable them to be useful workers in science—and, at the same time, to give them a general knowledge of what constitutes the bases of technical training, and such a skill in some special trade as would enable each of them to take his or her place in the grand world of the manual production of wealth. ”

“ Waste of time is the leading feature of our present education. Not only are we taught a mass of rubbish, but what is not rubbish is taught so as to make us waste over it as much time as possible. Our present methods of teaching originate from a time when the accomplishments required from an educated person were extremely limited; and they have been maintained, notwithstanding the immense increase of knowledge which must be conveyed to the scholar's mind since science has so much widened its former limits. ”