Love Quote by Emma Goldman

Goldman opens with a verbal eye-roll: "Free love?" The question mark is a trap, baiting polite society into admitting what it tries to deny. She flips the phrase from a scandal label into a moral indictment. If love has to be defended as "free", it’s already been dragged into the marketplace where everything gets priced, policed, and domesticated.

The first sentence is pure rhetorical jujitsu. Goldman insists love is "anything but free" not because it costs money, but because modern life makes it expensive in all the other ways: reputation, housing, legal status, women’s safety. By the time the state and church are done with it, love is less a feeling than a contract with penalties.

Then she sharpens the blade with "Man has bought brains". It’s an ugly, deliberate phrase. She’s not praising intelligence; she’s mocking a world that treats minds as commodities. Degrees, credentials, hired experts, obedient thinkers - capitalism can purchase brainpower on demand. The subtext is that power loves what it can rent.

But love won’t submit to that logic. "All the millions in the world have failed to buy love" is a challenge to both capital and patriarchy: you can buy labor, bodies, even consent-shaped compliance, but you can’t purchase the thing that makes intimacy real. In Goldman’s era - when marriage was women’s economic lifeline and sexual freedom was treated as social arson - that claim doubles as a political program. Love, for her, becomes the one stubborn human force that refuses to be made into property.