"Free love? as if love is anything but free. Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love"

Emma Goldman’s statement interrogates conventional ideas of both love and freedom, questioning the notion that love can be commodified or constrained by societal norms. By asking rhetorically whether there is such a thing as “free love” and immediately answering that love is “anything but free,” she strips away the veneer that suggests love can be subject to ownership, transaction, or social currency. Love, in its most genuine form, cannot be subjected to prices, bargains, or contracts; its authenticity relies precisely on its voluntary, spontaneous nature.

Her reference to the world having “bought brains” implies that intellectual labor, talent, or knowledge can be exchanged or purchased, pointing to the commodification present within capitalist and patriarchal structures. Money serves as a medium of exchange for almost everything, education, expertise, and even people’s bodies and labor. Love, however, stands apart from this market system. No sum of money, regardless of its size, can command the true stirring of affection, connection, or devotion in another’s heart.

Goldman subtly critiques the social institutions that try to regulate or possess love, such as marriage, laws, and religious dictates, implying that these attempts are ultimately powerless. Love cannot be legislated into existence, nor can affection be maintained through material incentive or compulsion. By highlighting this, Goldman reminds us of love’s fundamentally anarchic and egalitarian essence: it belongs to no one and refuses to be owned or traded, thus existing beyond the grasp of authority and capital.

Her statement serves as both a celebration and a challenge. It invites examination of the ways society seeks to regulate desire and affinity through artificial boundaries, and insists that genuine relationships flourish only where there is freedom, not coercion or transaction. True love, according to Goldman’s insight, is intrinsically boundless, an experience that inherently resists ownership, bought neither by gold nor by force.