The great majority of people have to work in order to earn a livelihood, and a sizable proportion of them are productive workers. A huge number of workers are unproductive as well. They operate entirely with the circumstances and framework created by the capitalist system, such as shuffling invoices, contracts, credit slips, insurance policies, and so forth. Probably nine out of ten "workers" wouldn't have any work to do in a rational society -- one that would not require insurance or any other commercial transactions.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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Our being is becoming, not stasis. Our science is utopia, our reality is eros, our desire is revolution.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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I believe in individual freedom; that's my primary and complete commitment -- individual liberty. That's what it's all about. And that's what socialism was supposed to be about, or anarchism was supposed to be about, and tragically has been betrayed.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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As a credo, individualist anarchism remained largely a bohemian lifestyle, most conspicuous in its demands for sexual freedom ("free love") and enamored of innovations in art, behavior, and clothing.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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When lifestyle anarchists call for autonomy rather than freedom, they thereby forfeit the rich social connotations of freedom.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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Ironically, the world idealized by primitivists would actually preclude the radical individualism celebrated by the individualist heirs of Max Stirner.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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The sovereign, self-sufficient "individual" has always been a precarious basis upon which to anchor a left libertarian outlook.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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Certainly, it is already no longer possible, in my view, to call oneself an anarchist without adding a qualifying adjective to distinguish oneself from lifestyle anarchists.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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Unless we realize that the present market society, structured around the brutally competitive imperative of "grow or die," is a thoroughly impersonal, self-operating mechanism, we will falsely tend to blame other phenomena -- such as technology or population growth -- for growing environmental dislocations.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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The idea of dominating nature has a history that is almost as old as that of hierarchy itself.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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The point social ecology emphasizes is not that moral and spiritual persuasion and renewal are meaningless or unnecessary; they are necessary and can be educational. But modern capitalism is structurally amoral and hence impervious to moral appeals.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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Like it or not, the future of life on this planet pivots on the future of society.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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The conflict between wage labor and capital, while it has by no means disappeared, nonetheless lacks the all-embracing importance that it possessed in the past.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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What underpins every social conflict in the United States today is the demand for the realization of all human potentialities in a fully rounded, balanced, totalistic way of life.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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Unfortunately, a preoccupation with technical size, scale, and even artistry deflects our attention away from the most significant problems of technics -- notably, its ties with the ideals and social structures of freedom.
		-- Murray Bookchin
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