““In his years in prison, Berkman had come to believe that bullets directed at their oppressors were insufficient because eliminating what he viewed as the representatives of modern slavery didn’t resolve the problem. “The real despotism of republican institutions,” he wrote Goldman, “is far deeper, more insidious, because it rests on the popular delusion of self-government and independent. That is the subtle source of democratic tyranny and, as such, it cannot be reached with a bullet.””
![“[It is a] happy truth that man is capable of self-government, and only rendered otherwise by the moral degradation designedly superinduced on him by the wicked acts of his tyrant.” quote by Thomas Jefferson](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/c52/thomas-jefferson-43_truth_it-is-a-happy-truth-that-man-is-capable_434452.jpg)
