‘’Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.’’ (World Health Organization)
“Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual and moral.” (Pyotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution).
“Mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable. Most mutual aid projects are volunteer-based, with people jumping in to participate because they want to change what is going on right now, not wait to convince corporations or politicians to do the right thing.” (Dean Spade)
“Don’t compete! — competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!” (Piotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution)
“Under any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life.” (Piotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution)
“In The Descent of Man he gave some powerful pages to illustrate its proper, wide sense. He pointed out how, in numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation, and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival.” (Piotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution)
“The species in which peace and mutual support are the rule, prosper, while the unsociable species decay.” (Piotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution)
“Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual and moral.” (Piotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution)
“The primitive man has one quality, elaborated and maintained by the very necessities of his hard struggle for life – he identifies his own existence with that of his tribe; and without that quality mankind never would have attained the level as it has attained now.” (Pyotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution)
“As soon as we study animals — not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains — we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Of course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance of both these series of facts. But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: “Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?” we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization. If the numberless facts which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into account, we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance, inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits and characters as insure the maintenance and further development of the species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste of energy.” (Piotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution)
“We know at the present time that all animals, beginning with the ants, going on to the birds, and ending with the highest mammals, are fond of plays, wrestling, running after each other, trying to capture each other, teasing each other, and so on. And while many plays are, so to speak, a school for the proper behaviour of the young in mature life, there are others, which, apart from their utilitarian purposes, are, together with dancing and singing, mere manifestations of an excess of forces — “the joy of life,” and a desire to communicate in some way or another with other individuals of the same or of other species — in short, a manifestation of sociability proper, which is a distinctive feature of all the animal world.” (Piotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution)
“Bread, it is bread that the Revolution needs! Let others spend their time in issuing pompous proclamations, in decorating themselves lavishly with official gold lace, and in talking about political liberty!… Be it ours to see, from the first day of the Revolution to the last, in all the provinces fighting for freedom, that there is not a single man who lacks bread, not a single woman compelled to stand with the wearied crowd outside the bakehouse-door, that haply a coarse loaf may be thrown to her in charity, not a single child pining for want of food. It has always been the middle-class idea to harangue about “great principles” – great lies rather! The idea of the people will be to provide bread for all. And while middle-class citizens, and workmen infested with middle-class ideas admire their own rhetoric in the “Talking Shops,” and “practical people” are engaged in endless discussions on forms of government, we, the “Utopian dreamers” – we shall have to consider the question of daily bread. We have the temerity to declare that all have a right to bread, that there is bread enough for all, and that with this watchword of Bread for All the Revolution will triumph.” (Piotr Kropotkin, The conquest of bread)
‘’A lot of people think the Breakfast for Children program is charity. But what does it do? It takes the people from a stage to another stage. Any program that’s revolutionary is an advancing program. Revolution is change.’’ (Fred Hampton)
‘’We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism.’’ (Fred Hampton)
“Societies in which most people depend for most of their goods and services on the personal whim, kindness, or skill of another are called underdeveloped, while those in which living has been transformed into a process of ordering from an all-encompassing store catalogue are called advanced.” (Ivan Illich, Tools for conviviality)
“I believe a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independant, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows us to produce and consume.” (Ivan Illich, Tools for conviviality)
“To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.” (Adam Smith)
‘’Cooperation for mutual benefit, a survival strategy very common in natural systems, is one that humanity needs to emulate.’’ (Eugene Odum)
‘’Biophilia, if it exists, and I believe it exists, is the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.’’ (Edward O. Wilson)
“The competition between the two forces can be succinctly expressed as follows: Within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.” (Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence)
“Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.” (Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia)
‘’Selfish genes give rise go altruistic individuals’’ (Richard Dawkins)
“Would I be happy if I discovered that I could go to heaven forever? And the answer is no. Consider this argument. Think about what is forever. And think about the fact that the human mind, the entire human being, is built to last a certain period of time. Our programmed hormonal systems, the way we learn, the way we settle upon beliefs, and the way we love are all temporary. Because we go through a life’s cycle. Now, if we were to be plucked out at the age of 12 or 56 or whenever, and taken up and told, “Now you will continue your existence as you are. We’re not going to blot out your memories. We’re not going to diminish your desires.” You will exist in a state of bliss – whatever that is – forever. […] Now think, a trillion times a trillion years. Enough time for universes like this one to be born, explode, form countless star systems and planets, then fade away to entropy. You will sit there watching this happen millions and millions of times and that will be just the beginning of the eternity that you’ve been consigned to bliss in this existence.” (Edward O. Wilson)
“The race is now on between the technoscientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it. . . . If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact.” (Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life)
“A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.” (Edward O. Wilson)
“The competition between the two forces can be succinctly expressed as follows: Within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.” (Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence)
“If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations.” (Edward O. Wilson)
“Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.” (Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia)
“Nevertheless, an iron rule exists in genetic social evolution. It is that selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. The victory can never be complete; the balance of selection pressures cannot move to either extreme. If individual selection were to dominate, societies would dissolve. If group selection were to dominate, human groups would come to resemble ant colonies.” (Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth)
“We need freedom to roam across land owned by no one but protected by all, whose unchanging horizon is the same that bounded the world of our millennial ancestors.” (Edward O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth)
“Social intelligence was therefore always at a high premium. A sharp sense of empathy can make a huge difference, and with it in an ability to manipulate, to gain cooperation, and to deceive.” (Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth)
“The origin of the human condition is best explained by the natural selection for social interaction—the inherited propensities to communicate, recognize, evaluate, bond, cooperate, compete, and from all these the deep warm pleasure of belonging to your own special group.” (Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence)
“Also, human groups are formed of highly flexible alliances, not just among family members but between families, genders, classes, and tribes. The bonding is based on cooperation among individuals or groups who know one another and are capable of distributing ownership and status on a personal basis.” (Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth)
“Individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.” (Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence)
‘’In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense—not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.’’ (Pyotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution)
‘’If state-supplied public goods either decline or become a mere vehicle for private accumulation (as is happening to education), and if the state withdraws from their provision, then there is only one possible response, which is for populations to selforganize to provide their own commons.’’ (David Harvey, Rebel Cities)
“It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.” (Aldous Huxley)