Protestation

Mao Zedong: There are people who think that Marxism is a kind of magic truth with which one can cure any disease. We should tell them that dogmas are more useless than cow dung. Dung can be used as fertilizer.

Võ Nguyên Giáp: The War of Liberation of the Vietnamese people proves that, in the face of an enemy as powerful as he is cruel, victory is possible only by uniting the whole people within the bosom of a firm and wide national united front based on the worker -peasant alliance.

Claudia Jones: Complete emancipation of women is possible only under Socialism.

Fidel Castro: Look at the history of the revolutionary movement, and you will find more than one connection between imperialism and those who take positions that appear to be on the extreme left.

Marcus Aurelius: The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

Maurice Bishop: We hold the truth itself to be revolutionary and we shall stand firm by its side.

Gus Hall: The ideological machinery of capitalism grinds out propaganda against labor in an endless stream, like a sausage machine turns out frankfurters.

Lenin: Without the victory of the revolutionary proletariat, there would be no peace for the people, land for the peasants, nor bread for the workers and all working people.

John Maynard Keynes: Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.

Selwyn Duke: The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.

Gudrun Ensslin: This fascist state intends to kill all of us. We must organize resistance. Violence can only be answered with violence. This is the generation of Auschwitz (referring to the West German government and society), you cannot argue with them.

Gudrun Ensslin: We have applied the Marxist analysis and method to the contemporary scene.

Gudrun Ensslin: Because it is not the lefty ass-kissers you have to agitate, but the objective left-wing.

Gudrun Ensslin: You have to make clear that it's social democratic bullshit to claim that imperialism along with all the Neubauers and Westmorelands, Bonn, the senate, the State Youth Welfare Office and district offices, that the whole filth can be undermined, duped, overpowered, intimidated, and eliminated without a fight. Make it clear that the revolution will not be an Easter stroll.

Gudrun Ensslin: Without simultaneously building the Red Army, every conflict, all political work in the factories, in the Wedding and Märkische Viertel districts,** in the Plötze,*** and in the courtroom will degenerate into nothing more than reformism, which means you merely push through better means of discipline, better methods of intimidation, better methods of exploitation. All that does is break the people down. It does not break down what breaks the people down!

Gudrun Ensslin: Develop the class struggles. Organize the proletariat. Start the armed resistance!

Joe Biden: For God's sake, this man (Putin) cannot remain in power.

Eduardo Galeano: For us capitalism is not a dream to be made a reality. Our challenge lies not in privatising the state but in deprivatising it. Our states have been bought at bargain prices by the owners of the land, the banks and everything else.

Kwame Ture: Organization is the weapon of the oppressed.

Fidel Castro: Without the sacrifices made by the Soviet people, fascism would have been imposed on the whole world for at least a brief period of time. Everybody would have personally learned of the horrors of fascism.

Vladimir Putin: The West is an empire of lies.

Lenin: This so-called bipartisan system prevailing in America and Britain has been one of the most powerful means of preventing the rise of an independent working-class, i.e., genuinely socialist, party.

Lenin: And for a whole half-century—since the Civil War over slavery in 1860–65—two bourgeois parties have been distinguished there by remarkable solidity and strength. The party of the former slave-owners is the so-called Democratic Party. The capitalist party, which favoured the emancipation of the Negroes, has developed into the Republican Party. Since the emancipation of the Negroes, the distinction between the two parties has been diminishing. The fight between these two parties has been mainly over the height of customs duties. Their fight has not had any serious importance for the mass of the people. The people have been deceived and diverted from their vital interests by means of spectacular and meaningless duels between the two bourgeois parties.

Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh: I would very much like to go to Russia - although the bastards murdered half my family.

Eugene V. Debs: I am opposed to every war but one; I am for that war with heart and soul, and that is the world-wide war of Social Revolution.

Robespierre: The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.

Yuri Gagarin: Looking at Earth from afar you realize it is too small for conflict and just big enough for cooperation.

Lenin: The rule of the proletariat is expressed in the fact that landowner and capitalist property has been taken away.

Kim Il Sung: It is necessary to expose the false propaganda of the imperialists and thoroughly dispel the illusion that the imperialists will give up their positions in the colonies and dependent countries with good will.

Lenin: The people need peace; the people need bread; the people need land. And they give you war, hunger, no bread—leave the landlords still on the land.

Lenin: But when they face the workers, our liquidators act according to the saying: A lion among the lambs becomes a lamb among the lions.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Labour movement is the principal force that transformed misery and dispair into hope and progress.

Stalin: Your cause is just, Victory will be yours, death to fascist invaders!

Muammar Gaddafi: They want to do to Libya what they did to Iraq and what they are itching to do to Iran. They want to take back the oil, which was nationalized by these country’s revolutions. They want to re-establish military bases that were shut down by the revolutions and to install client regimes that will subordinate the country’s wealth and labor to imperialist corporate interests. All else is lies and deception.

Stalin: Some people believe that Marxism and anarchism are based on the same principles and that the disagreements between them concern only tactics, so that, in the opinion of these people, no distinction whatsoever can be drawn between these two trends. This is a great mistake. We believe that the Anarchists are real enemies of Marxism. Accordingly, we also hold that a real struggle must be waged against real enemies.

Stalin: A true revolutionary is not that demonstrates value in the period of the victorious uprising, but who knows how to fight not only at the time of the victorious advance but also at the retreat of the revolution; that demonstrates value in the period of the defeat of the proletariat, which does not lose the head, which does not abandon the road when the revolution suffers a defeat and the enemy records successes; which is not dominated by panic, or falls into despair in the retreat of the revolution period.

Stalin: You speak of Sinified socialism. There is nothing of the sort in nature. There is no Russian, English, French, German, Italian socialism, as much as there is no Chinese socialism. There is only one Marxist-Leninist socialism. It is another thing, that in the building of socialism it is necessary to take into consideration the specific features of a particular country. Socialism is a science, necessarily having, like all science, certain general laws, and one just needs to ignore them and the building of socialism is destined to failure.

Thomas Sankara: Imperialism is a system of exploitation that occurs not only in the brutal form of those who come with guns to conquer territory. Imperialism often occurs in more subtle forms, a loan, food aid, blackmail. We are fighting this system that allows a handful of men on Earth to rule all of humanity.

Lenin: We believe that historical events should be judged by the movements of the masses and of classes as a whole, not by the moods of individuals or small groups.

Mao Zedong: The ideological and social system of capitalism...resembles "a dying person who is sinking fast, like the sun setting beyond the western hills", and will soon be relegated to the museum.

Bible: Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

Otto von Bismarck: The power of Russia can only be undermined by the separation of Ukraine from it ... it is necessary not only to tear off, but also to oppose Ukraine to Russia. To do this, you only need to find and nurture traitors among the elite and, with their help, change the self-awareness of one part of the great people to such an extent that they will hate everything Russian, hate their kind, without realizing it. Everything else is a matter of time.

Stalin: The leaders come and go, but the people remain. Only the people are immortal, everything else is ephemeral.

Bhagat Singh: We want a socialist revolution, the indispensable preliminary to which is the political revolution. That is what we want.

Lenin: War is a continuation of policy by other means. All wars are inseparable from the political systems that engender them. The policy which a given state, a given class within that state, pursued for a long time before the war is inevitably continued by that same class during the war, the form of action alone being changed.

Bhagat Singh: The struggle in India would continue so long as a handful of exploiters go on exploiting the labour of the common people for their own ends.

John Locke: Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Lenin: But Marxists know that democracy does not abolish class oppression. It only makes the class struggle more direct, wider, more open and pronounced, and that is what we need.

Lenin: Socialism cannot be decreed from above. Its spirit rejects the mechanical bureaucratic approach; living, creative socialism is the product of the masses themselves.

Xi Jinping: Marx is the teacher of revolution for the proletariat and working people all over the world, as well as the main founder of Marxism, creator of Marxist parties, pathfinder for international communism and the greatest thinker of modern times.

Lenin: The essential nature of international relations under capitalism—the open robbery of the weaker—is fully and clearly exposed by war.

Lenin: The Economist, a journal that speaks for the British millionaires, is pursuing a very instructive line in relation to the war.

Kim Jong-Il: A decadent material life, a poor mental and cultural life and a reactionary political life-these can be said to be the main characteristics of capitalist society, and they show the anti-popular nature and corruption of modern imperialism.

Joe Biden: The only thing that can provoke a hostile and energetic response from Russia is NATO expansion into the Baltic states.

Ho Chi Minh: People with revolutionary virtues fear neither difficulties, hardships nor failures; they neither waver nor step back. For the sake of the interests of the Party, the revolution, the class, the nation and mankind, they never hesitate to sacrifice their own interests, and if need be, even their own lives. This is a very clear and lofty expression of revolutionary morality.

Yamakawa Hitoshi: (T)he government is a government of the bourgeois and we should have no expectations towards (it)... we should not expect the government to give us anything... What we want (and) need from the government, we must forcefully tear from its hands.

Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim: Women will never be equal with men in a society where a man is not equal to a man.

Clara Zetkin: The cruel fate of the masses weigh with especial heaviness on the women, unless they happen to be appendages of the capitalist industrialist magnates, dealers, speculators, profiteers, and usurers. There is no misery of the present day which is not felt by the women with double and multiple intensity.

Gramsci: One doesn’t remake society by fiat, because the evil of the past is not an edifice of papier-mâché that is brought down in an instant.

Rafael Cancel Miranda: They presented us to the world as a slave who is proud of their chains, which is an insult!

Lyudmila Pavlichenko: Every time my bullet fells a Nazi I have the feeling that I have saved lives. Any people who have had Nazis trampling over their land know that for the Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people.

Eric Ambler: The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.

Stalin: The Ukraine with its natural wealth has long been an object of imperialist exploitation. Before the revolution the Ukraine was exploited by the Western imperialists quietly, so to speak, without "military operations."

Lenin: It is at moments of need that one learns who one’s friends are.

Lenin: If socialism is not victorious, peace between the capitalist States will be only a truce, an interlude, a time of preparation for a fresh slaughter of the peoples.

Jessica Smith: We salute you, Liudmila Pavlichenko, for all that you have done and will do in our common cause. The strength and inspiration we draw from your presence among us will help each one of us to be a better fighter against the enemies of mankind.

Lyudmila Pavlichenko: Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind.

Andrei Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky: The proletarian state is a special form of leadership of the remaining masses of toilers by the proletariat. For precisely this reason it represents the highest form of democracy possible in a class society.

Andrei Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky: The Soviet state is the historically integrated form of the state during the transition period from capitalism to communism.

Lenin: Thus, the twentieth century marks the turning-point from the old capitalism to the new, from the domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital.

Andrei Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky: Marxism-Leninism ... teaches that the legal relationships (and, consequently, law itself) are rooted in the material conditions of life, and that law is merely the will of the dominant class, elevated into a statute.

Andrei Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky: The Soviet state represents the expression of the highest possible form of democracy.

Andrei Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky: Soviet democracy ensures the domination in society of the will of the majority of the workers and peasants, the majority of the working people, as participants in the administration of the state.

Andrei Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky: (The) Soviet government is the expression of the most complete and most fully developed democracy. At the same time, it is the expression of the dictatorship of the working class, which secures the very possibility of democracy for the people. Soviet democracy and proletarian dictatorship are two aspects of one and the same phenomenon.

Muammar Gaddafi: Why are Africans going to Europe? Why are Asians going to Europe? Why are Latin Americans going to Europe? It is because Europe colonized those peoples and stole the material and human resources of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Lenin: 'The right of nations to self-determination', which, as everyone knows, the Marxist programme regards—and the programme of inter national democracy has always regarded—as referring to the defence of oppressed nations.

H. G. Wells: The Open Conspiracy rests upon a disrespect for nationality, and there is no reason why it should tolerate noxious or obstructive governments because they hold their own in this or that patch of human territory.

Stephen O’Neil: Despite their traditional political image, the Fabians, under the impetus of Sidney Webb, thought that they had a new and unique weapon in the policy of permeation. It was through the utilization of this tactic, according to Webb, that the Fabians, in the spirit of the Trojans and their legendary horse, would enter the ranks and minds of the politically influential by providing them with programs, ideas, opinion, and research heavily documented with statistics which could be conveniently drafted into public policy.

Sir Julian Huxley: The moral for UNESCO is clear. The task laid upon it of promoting peace and security can never be wholly realised through the means assigned to it- education, science and culture. It must envisage some form of world political unity, whether through a single world government or otherwise, as the only certain means of avoiding war… in its educational programme it can stress the ultimate need for a world political unity and familiarize all peoples with the implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world organization.

Sir Julian Huxley: At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilization is dysgenic instead of eugenic, and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability and disease proneness, which already exist in the human species will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable.

Bertrand Russell: The subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First that the influence of home is obstructive. Second that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Thirdly verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.

Bertrand Russell: I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology…. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called ‘education’. Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema and the radio play an increasing part… it may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the state with money and equipment.

R. Palme Dutt: This is no time for pessimism. This is no time for impotent pacifist lamentations, or for passive acceptance of this shipwreck of human society. We must act, if mankind is not to be destroyed.

R. Palme Dutt: Why can the rulers of the most advanced "civilised" capitalist states offer to the people nothing but unlimited barbarism, destruction, economic chaos, spreading famine and disease, terror and slaughter?

Lenin: They all call themselves Marxists, but their conception of Marxism is impossibly pedantic. They have completely failed to understand what is decisive in Marxism, namely, its revolutionary dialectics.

Lenin: Marx said that the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat lies between capitalism and communism. The more the proletariat presses the bourgeoisie, the more furiously they will resist. We know what vengeance was wreaked on the workers in France in 1848. And when people charge us with harshness we wonder how they can forget the rudiments of Marxism.

Julian Assange: To keep a person ignorant is to place them in a cage.

Ulrike Meinhof: If you hear that I've killed myself, you can be sure it was murder.

Karl Marx: A nation cannot become free and at the same time continue to oppress other nations. The liberation of Germany cannot therefore take place without the liberation of Poland from German oppression.

Karl Marx: Under the freedom of trade the whole severity of the laws of political economy will be applied to the working classes. Is that to say that we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon a greater extent of territory, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions into a single group, where they stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletarians.

Karl Marx: To sum up, what is free trade, what is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. When you have overthrown the few national barriers which still restrict the progress of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action. So long as you let the relation of wage labor to capital exist, it does not matter how favorable the conditions under which the exchange of commodities takes place, there will always be a class which will exploit and a class which will be exploited. It is really difficult to understand the claim of the free-traders who imagine that the more advantageous application of capital will abolish the antagonism between industrial capitalists and wage workers. On the contrary, the only result will be that the antagonism of these two classes will stand out still more clearly.

Karl Marx: A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.

Karl Marx: It will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory. The petty bourgeoisie will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. ... the rule of the bourgeois democrats, from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction, and its subsequent displacement by the proletariat will be made considerably easier.

Karl Marx: The revolution made progress, not by its immediate tragicomic achievements but by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution, an opponent in combat with whom the party of overthrow ripened into a really revolutionary party.

Karl Marx: The democratic petty bourgeois, far from wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to make the existing society as tolerable for themselves as possible. ... The rule of capital is to be further counteracted, partly by a curtailment of the right of inheritance, and partly by the transference of as much employment as possible to the state. As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain wage labourers as before. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers; in short, they hope to bribe the workers ...

Karl Marx: Capital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity; the former is the general form of wealth, the other only the substance destined for immediate consumption. Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because natural need has been replaced by historically produced need. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself.

Lenin: Let us first of all take the most concrete example of state capitalism. Everybody knows what this example is. It is Germany. Here we have “the last word” in modern large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organisation, subordinated to Junker-bourgeois imperialism.

Alexandra Kollontai: Then came the great days of the October Revolution. (…) The sleepless nights, the permanent sessions. And, finally, the stirring declarations: ‘The Soviets take power!’ ‘The Soviets (have) put an end to the war.’ ‘The land is socialized and belongs to the peasants!

Otto Kuusinen: The speed with which a party passes from one stage to another depends on objective conditions, as well as on the correctness of its own policies and the ability of its leadership. The aggravation of the general crisis of capitalism and the successes of the forces of socialism, and the increase in the political maturity and experience of the party membership, create in our days the prerequisites for all Communist Parties of the capitalist countries to rise to a higher level of development.

Stalin: It is impossible to finish off capitalism without having finished off social democracy in the working-class movement.