Aging & Wisdom Quote by Frederica Montseny

Constancy is usually sold as a virtue; Montseny sharpens it until it can cut. By immediately offering “madness” as the alternate name for perseverance, she frames political commitment as something that looks irrational from the outside but becomes rational inside the pressure-cooker of crisis. That word-choice is doing quiet propaganda work: it preempts the accusation that radicals are unhinged by conceding the charge, then flipping it into a badge of necessity.

The target, “the old democracy,” is equally barbed. Montseny isn’t mourning democracy’s fragility; she’s indicting a Spanish version so fossilized it functions as oppression. Calling it “a hundred years behind the times” reads like a timeline, but it’s really a moral judgment about stagnation dressed up as modernity. Spain’s political order, in her telling, hides coercion under respectable parliamentary clothing, and only relentless pressure can expose it.

Context matters: Montseny was an anarchist leader and a rare female minister during the Second Spanish Republic, speaking from a moment when “democracy” was contested terrain and the state’s legitimacy was being fought over in streets as much as in chambers. The line’s real intent is to justify endurance in a struggle that will be labeled extremist, futile, even self-destructive. Subtext: if the system calls you mad, keep going anyway. The madness isn’t the commitment; it’s the expectation that a backward “democracy” will reform itself without being worn down.