Goldman wrote the line in “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” the lead essay of Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910). The famous one-liner is genuine but truncated — in the book it is a clause inside a rhetorical question: “How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance; that its power of destruction is the very thing Anarchism is combating?”
“The most violent element in society is ignorance” Emma Goldman, "Anarchism: What It Really Stands For," in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910). Full sentence: "How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance; that its power of destruction is the very thing Anarchism is combating?" Verified at Quotle.info.
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Provenance
The source
Essay
Anarchism: What It Really Stands For
Collection
Anarchism and Other Essays
First published
1910 — Mother Earth Publishing Association, New York
Text verified against
Second revised edition, 1911 (Wikisource, Project Gutenberg #2162, The Anarchist Library)
The emotions of the ignorant man are continuously kept at a pitch by the most blood-curdling stories about Anarchism. Not a thing too outrageous to be employed against this philosophy and its exponents. … Destruction and violence! How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance; that its power of destruction is the very thing Anarchism is combating?“Anarchism: What It Really Stands For” (1910)
The line that circulates today is the emphasised clause, lifted out of the question and set down as a standalone maxim.
Goldman published the line in her first book, Anarchism and Other Essays ↗, brought out in 1910 by the Mother Earth Publishing Association — the publishing arm of her own journal — and containing the essay “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For.”
The Open Library catalogue record ↗ gives the first edition as New York, Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910, 277 pages.
Page images of the Mother Earth printing are online at the Internet Archive ↗, digitised from the Rutgers University Libraries copy.
✓Public domain
The sentence comes from Anarchism and Other Essays, first published in New York by the Mother Earth Publishing Association in 1910, with a second revised edition in 1911. Both printings long predate 1931, so the text is in the public domain in the United States — which is why Project Gutenberg, Wikisource and the Internet Archive all host it in full.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Genuine — but not as it’s usually printed
This one survives the usual test: it really is Goldman, and the book is easy to check. What has gone missing is the sentence around it — and, on some sites, any source at all.
✕
The wordingQuote aggregators Truncated
Goodreads ↗ prints the bare sentence with no work, essay or year attached, under a standing notice that its quotes are added by users and are not verified. The original is not a statement but a question: “How is the ordinary man to know that…”
✕
The citationModern reprint listings Misdated
LibQuotes ↗ sources the line to a 2015 Sheba Blake Publishing edition of Anarchism and Other Essays — a modern reissue, not the 1910 Mother Earth Publishing Association original in which the sentence first appeared.
✕
A neighbouring lineEmma Goldman Fabricated
Goldman is a heavy magnet for invented quotations. The most-shared of them — “If voting changed anything, it would be made illegal” — sits in the Disputed section of her Wikiquote page ↗, which finds no evidence she said it and traces the earliest known example to a 1976 opinion piece by Robert S. Borden in The Sun of Lowell, Massachusetts.
✓The eight famous words are authentically Goldman’s, and you can read them in context in Chapter 1 on Wikisource ↗ — but quote them with the half that follows, or you lose the argument she was making.
Context
Why the missing half matters
Goldman was not writing an aphorism about education. She was answering a smear. The paragraph opens with the press caricature of anarchism — “Destruction and violence!” — and her sentence turns the charge around: the thing actually doing the destroying, she argues, is the ignorance that keeps the public terrified of ideas it has never examined. The line is a rebuttal, not a maxim.
Stripped of that setting, the sentence reads like a genial plea for literacy, which is roughly how it circulates today on posters and quote sites. Restored to the page, it is a working anarchist in 1910 telling readers that the mob frightened of her philosophy is the more dangerous party. Same eight words, a noticeably sharper point.
In the book it is not a statement at all. It is the middle of a question.
The paragraph it comes from
“Anarchism: What It Really Stands For” is the opening argumentative essay of Anarchism and Other Essays, Goldman’s first book, issued by the publishing arm of her own journal Mother Earth. A second revised edition followed in 1911; the sentence is unchanged in the transcriptions of that 1911 text.
The essay’s method throughout is this same inversion — taking the words used against anarchism (destruction, violence, crime) and reassigning them to the institutions doing the accusing. Elsewhere in the same essay: “Crime is naught but misdirected energy.”
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1869–1940 · Anarchist writer, lecturer & editor of Mother Earth
Born in Kaunas in 1869 in what was then the Russian Empire, Emma Goldman emigrated to the United States in 1885 and became the most notorious anarchist orator in America — and the editor of the journal Mother Earth, whose publishing arm brought out her first book. Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) was that book: essays on prisons, patriotism, political violence, marriage, and the “traffic in women.” She was deported from the United States in 1919 and died in Toronto in 1940.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
How to cite this
Emma Goldman, “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910). Wording verified against the second revised edition (New York and London: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1911) as transcribed by Wikisource, Project Gutenberg (EBook #2162) and The Anarchist Library.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The most violent element in society is ignorance’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-most-violent-element-in-society-is-ignorance/