Bristol Radical History Group

“In any honest service there is thin commons, low wages and hard labour; in this plenty and safiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power. No, a merry life and a short one shall be my motto.”
Bartholomew Roberts
“..either poverty will use democracy to win the struggle against property, or property, in fear of poverty, will destroy democracy.”
Aneurin Bevan
“Despotism has passed from the place of kings to the circle of a committee. It is neither the royal robes, nor the sceptre, nor the crown, that makes kings hated, but ambition and tyranny. In my country there has been only a change in dress.”
Jean Varlet
“[Nationalist movements] have an in-built tendency towards extremism and xenophobia, towards self-righteousness on the one hand and demonising the enemy on the other. History is often falsified and even fabricated to serve a nationalist political agenda.”
Avi Shalaim
“... I had come to the understand one thing: if women's rights are a problem for some modern Muslim men, it is neither because of the Koran, nor the Prophet, nor the Islamic tradition, but simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite. The elite faction is trying to convince us that their egotistical, highly subjective and mediocre view of culture and society has a sacred basis.”
Fatima Mernissi
“People without political organisation, and therefore less depraved than ourselves, have perfectly understood that man who is called 'criminal' is simply unfortunate; that the remedy is not to flog him, to chain him up, or kill him on the scaffold or in prison, but to help him by the most brotherly care, by treatment based on equality, by the usage of life amongst honest men.”
Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin
“There is not in the world a truer object of pity than a child terrified at every glance, watching with anxious uncertainty the caprices of a pedagogue.”
William Godwin
“First by asserting herself as a personality, and not a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family etc., by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer. That, is by trying to learn the meaning and substance of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set women free...”
Emma Goldman The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation
“Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.”
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
“I am going to fight capitalism even if it kills me. It is wrong that people like you should be comfortable and well fed while all around you people are starving.”
Sylvia Pankhurst

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