Love & Passion Quote by Emma Goldman

Goldman isn’t trying to shock for sport; she’s prying morality off its pedestal and showing the seams. By calling humans “much more of a sex creature than a moral creature,” she flips the usual hierarchy: desire isn’t the messy exception to an otherwise ethical species, it’s the baseline. Morality, she argues, is the add-on - “grafted,” like a branch forced onto a tree for someone else’s harvest. The choice of metaphor matters. Grafting can produce fruit, but it’s also artificial, controlled, and often done to standardize what grows. That’s Goldman’s jab at bourgeois respectability: sexual regulation is marketed as virtue while functioning as social management.

The intent is political as much as personal. As an anarchist and feminist writing in an era of Comstock laws, censorship, and punitive attitudes toward contraception, Goldman saw “morality” deployed as a tool: to discipline women, police the poor, and shore up the family as an economic unit. Sex, in this framing, is not merely private appetite; it’s a site where power gets enforced - through shame, marriage norms, and the criminalization of information.

The subtext is a refusal of moral absolutism. If morality is grafted, it’s contingent: shaped by institutions, sermons, and laws, not etched into human nature. Goldman’s provocation clears room for an ethic rooted in autonomy and honesty rather than denial. She’s betting that a society less obsessed with sexual control would have to find other, less hypocritical ways to talk about responsibility.