Leadership Quote by Frederica Montseny

Authority, for Montseny, is not a throne to seize but a stain you keep trying to scrub out. The line’s power comes from its refusal to treat power as a clean, binary thing - possessed or abolished. Instead, she frames it as arithmetic and leftovers: you subtract, you reduce, but there is always a residue. That word is the tell. Residue is what clings after the official story ends, what remains in habits, institutions, language, even in the revolutionary’s own reflex to command.

Montseny wasn’t writing from the safe distance of political theory. As an anarchist who became Spain’s Minister of Health during the Civil War, she lived the central paradox of anti-authoritarian politics: governing in order to dismantle governance. The quote reads like a confession and a warning. Confession, because it admits that even the most radical movements reproduce the very hierarchies they denounce. Warning, because it rejects the fantasy of a final purge. There is no historical moment where authority simply disappears; there is only ongoing, deliberate attrition.

The subtext is aimed at two audiences at once. To the state and its defenders: your “legitimate authority” is not sacred; it can be whittled down. To comrades intoxicated by purity: don’t mistake a change of personnel for liberation. Authority reappears as bureaucracy, as moral certainty, as “temporary measures.” Montseny’s sentence works because it trades revolutionary spectacle for the unglamorous ethic of constant reduction - politics as vigilance, not victory.