Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Goldman argues that while equal rights in work and life are important, the fundamental human need is the capacity to love and be loved.
In plain terms
Work rights matter, but love is the most important right.
What can you take from it?
Prioritize emotional connection alongside legal rights.

Where it applies

  • personal relationships
  • policy making
  • labor movements

Putting it to work

  • advocate for holistic human rights
  • build community support

Questions to consider

  • What rights do you take for granted?
  • How does love factor into justice?

Another view

It overlooks how material conditions can prevent people from loving freely.

More from Emma Goldman

  1. Social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not thro…

    Permalink to quote #81
  2. The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments…

    Permalink to quote #83
  3. Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals …

    Permalink to quote #80

Related quotes

  1. It doesn't matter who you love, it's that you love. Who cares if men marry men or women marry women? In San Francisco you don't care, and I applaud that. And I…

    Megan MullallyMegan Mullally quote #1
  2. The principle of the brotherhood of man is that narcissistic one, for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that w…

    Germaine GreerGermaine Greer quote #9
  3. While acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem …

    Lucy StoneLucy Stone quote #15