Protestation

Miguel de Cervantes: The gratification of wealth is not found in mere possession or in lavish expenditure, but in its wise application.

Miguel de Cervantes: Love and war are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other.

Miguel de Cervantes: Pray, look better, sir... those things yonder are no giants, but windmills.

Sidney Sheldon: Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better.

Kim Jong-Il: Art that moves the people's thoughts and hearts is a powerful weapon of the revolutionary struggle that transforms the world.

Ted Grant: Not a wheel turns, not a lightbulb shines and not a telephone rings without the kind permission of the working class. But under capitalism, the means of production are the private property of the capitalist class: they own the machinery, the plants and the factories. The workers have no claim either to the instruments or the products of their labour, and they have no choice but to work in order to survive. This entire process is not planned according to social need, but operates anarchically to maximise profit for the capitalists.

William Lloyd Garrison: With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.

Gore Vidal: There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.

George L. Jackson: The U.S. is the Korean problem, the Vietnamese problem, the problem in the Congo, Angola, Mozambique, the Middle East. It's the grease in the British and Latin Amerikan guns that operate against the masses of common people.

Baruch Spinoza: Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

Bible: I know your tribulation and your poverty (but you are rich) and the slander(a) of those who say that they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.

Bible: I will make those who are of the synagogue of Satan, who claim to be Jews though they are not, but are liars—I will make them come and fall down at your feet and acknowledge that I have loved you.

Bertrand Russell: Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

Medea Benjamin: Two war parties... It's the system that needs to change.

Antonio Machado: Lies are the most destructive weapon used by fascism.

Antonio Machado: Today is always yet.

Antonio Machado: Did you tell half the truth? They'll say you're lying twice if you tell the other half.

Antonio Machado: in Spain the best is the people. In the hard trances, the ladies invoke the homeland and sell it. The people don't even name her, but she buys her blood and save it.

Antonio Machado: Walker, there is no path, the path is made by walking.

Antonio Machado: Only a fool confuses value and price.

Antonio Machado: If it's good to live, then it's better to be asleep dreaming, and best of all, mother, is to awake.

Antonio Machado: The eye you see is not an eye because you see it; it is an eye because it sees you.

Antonio Machado: Young people, do politics, because otherwise politics will be done without you.

Antonio Machado: In Spain, for every ten heads, nine ram and one thinks.

Antonio Machado: It is typical of those with narrow minds, to attack everything that does not fit in their head.

A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer. - anonymous

Lord Acton: Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

Hillary Clinton: We came, we saw, he died (Muamar el Gadafi).

George Orwell: So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult… All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontentment led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.

Carl Jung: Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

George Orwell: People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Hugh Culliton: Capitalism is based on the ridiculous notion that you can enjoy limitless growth in a finite system. In biology such behavior of cells is call "cancer".

León Gieco: I only ask of God that the pain is not indifferent to me, that the dried death does not encounter me empty and alone without having done enough.

Voltaire: When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.

Tony Cliff: If I’m travelling on a filthy dirty train, as a white man under capitalism I will have a seat next to the window. The woman or the black or whoever will have a seat away from the window in even worse conditions than me. But the real problem is the train. We all have to endure the same train. We have no control over a driver who is taking us all into the abyss. Why does the capitalist class keep reminding us of these differences? Because it wants to turn our attention away from the key problem: class relations. All the time we’re told to look at personal relations, at arguments between one section and another. That is why socialists should detest concepts such as the enemy of the unskilled is the skilled, the enemy of the man is the woman, or the other way round.

Pablo Neruda: There are wounds that, instead of opening our skin, open our eyes.

Hillary Clinton: We created Al Qaeda (in order to fight the Soviet Union).

Joseph Goebbels: Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.

Stalin: The workers cannot trust their leaders when these leaders sink into the swamp of the diplomatic game, when their words are not supported by deeds, when the words and deeds of leaders do not coincide.

Kwame Nkrumah: Race is inextricably linked with class exploitation. In a racist-capitalist power structure, capitalist exploitation and race oppression are complementary; the removal of one ensures the removal of the other.

Karl Marx: The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistably tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen's gentlemen with pen and inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility.

Friedrich Engels: For it (dialectical philosophy), nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain. It has, of course, also a conservative side; it recognizes that definite stages of knowledge and society are justified for their time and circumstances; but only so far. The conservatism of this mode of outlook is relative; its revolutionary character is absolute — the only absolute dialectical philosophy admits.

Lenin: But despite all its mistakes the Commune was a superb example of the great proletarian movement of the nineteenth century. Marx set a high value on the historic significance of the Commune—if, during the treacherous attempt by the Versailles gang to seize the arms of the Paris proletariat, the workers had allowed themselves to be disarmed without a fight, the disastrous effect of the demoralisation, that this weakness would have caused in the proletarian movement, would have been far, far greater than the losses suffered by the working class in the battle to defend its arms.(3) The sacrifices of the Commune, heavy as they were, are made up for by its significance for the general struggle of the proletariat: it stirred the socialist movement throughout Europe, it demonstrated the strength of civil war, it dispelled patriotic illusions, and destroyed the naïve belief in any efforts of the bourgeoisie for common national aims. The Commune taught the European proletariat to pose concretely the tasks of the socialist revolution. The lesson learnt by the proletariat will not be forgotten. The working class will make use of it, as it has already done in Russia during the December uprising.

Hardial Bains: Religion (in Albania) has been officially banned as a result of the mass opposition which turned into a tremendous mass movement irresistibly demanding the expropriation of the churches and mosques — institutions used by the foreign invaders and internal reactionaries to exploit and suppress the masses of the people and to enslave the nation. We visited a museum on atheism which depicts the anti-scientific, anti-people and traitorous role of religion in the hands of imperialism, social-imperialism and all reaction. We also visited a sports arena converted from a big church expropriated at the demand of the young people in the latter part of the sixties. This sports arena also contains a gymnasium for young boys and girls who we saw carrying out gymnastic exercises. Religion has become a museum-piece in Albania. The Albanian people have won a great victory on this front as well.

Lu Xun: Beyond boundless lands and oceans. Countless souls are all connected to me.

Nikolai Bukharin: Enrich yourselves!

Leonardo da Vinci: Fix your course to a star and you can navigate through any storm.

Leonardo da Vinci: The water of the river you touch is the last of the one that went and the first of the one that comes. Thus the present tense.

Leonardo da Vinci: Poor is the pupil that does not surpass his master.

Leonardo da Vinci: Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but rather memory.

Leonardo da Vinci: The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.

Leonardo da Vinci: He who does not value life does not deserve it.

Leonardo da Vinci: As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

Leonardo da Vinci: Many have made a trade of delusions and false miracles, deceiving the stupid multitude. Pharisees — that is to say, friars.

Leonardo da Vinci: He who does not punish evil commands it to be done.

Leonardo da Vinci: He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.

Leonardo da Vinci: Those who fall in love with practice without science are like a sailor who enters a ship without a helm or a compass, and who never can be certain whither he is going.

Leonardo da Vinci: Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers.

Leonardo da Vinci: Truth was the only daughter of Time.

Leonardo da Vinci: Wisdom is the daughter of experience.

Leonardo da Vinci: All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions.

Stuart Hall: The university is a critical institution or it is nothing.

Ernst Bloch: Only an atheist can be a good Christian; only a Christian can be a good atheist.

Ernst Bloch: The best thing about religion is that it makes for heretics.

Marie Curie: I am among those who think that science has great beauty.

George Carlin: The CIA doesn't kill anybody anymore they neutralise people.

George Carlin: The government doesn't lie they engage in misinformation.

Haile Selassie I: Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

Nietzsche: All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

Stalin: How do the Social-Democratic parties of the West exist and develop nowadays? Have they inner-party contradictions, disagreements based on principle? Of course, they have. Do they disclose these contradictions and try to over come them honestly and openly in sight of the mass of the party membership? No, of course not. It is the practice of the Social-Democrats to cover up and conceal these contradictions and disagreements. It is the practice of the Social-Democrats to turn their conferences and congresses into an empty parade of ostensible well-being, assiduously covering up and slurring over internal disagreements. But nothing can come of this except stuffing people's heads with rubbish and the ideological impoverishment of the party. This is one of the reasons for the decline of West-European Social-Democracy, which was once revolutionary, and is now reformist. We, however, cannot live and develop in that way, comrades. The policy of a "middle" line in matters of principle is not our policy. The policy of a "middle" line in matters of principle is the policy of decaying and degenerating parties. Such a policy cannot but lead to the conversion of the party into an empty bureaucratic apparatus, running idle and divorced from the masses of the workers. That path is not our path.

Stalin: I think that the source of the contradictions within the proletarian parties lies in two circumstances. What are these circumstances? They are, firstly, the pressure exerted by the bourgeoisie and bourgeois ideology on the proletariat and its party in the conditions of the class struggle—a pressure to which the least stable strata of the proletariat, and, hence, the least stable strata of the proletarian party, not infrequently succumb. It must not be thought that the proletariat is completely isolated from society, that it stands outside society. The proletariat is a part of society, connected with its diverse strata by numerous threads. But the party is a part of the proletariat. Hence the Party cannot be exempt from connections with, and from the influence of, the diverse sections of bourgeois society. The pressure of the bourgeoisie and its ideology on the proletariat and its party finds expression in the fact that bourgeois ideas, manners, customs and sentiments not infrequently penetrate the proletariat and its party through definite strata of the proletariat that are in one way or another connected with bourgeois society. They are, secondly, the heterogeneity of the working class, the existence of different strata within the working class. I think that the proletariat, as a class, can be divided into three strata. One stratum is the main mass of the proletariat, its core, its permanent part, the mass of "pure-blooded" proletarians, who have long broken off connection with the capitalist class. This stratum of the proletariat is the most reliable bulwark of Marxism. The second stratum consists of newcomers from non-proletarian classes—from the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie or the intelligentsia. These are former members of other classes who have only recently merged with the proletariat and have brought with them into the working class their customs, their habits, their waverings and their vacillations. This stratum constitutes the most favourable soil for all sorts of anarchist, semi-anarchist and "ultra-Left" groups. The third stratum, lastly, consists of the labour aristocracy, the upper stratum of the working class, the most well-to-do portion of the proletariat, with its propensity for compromise with the bourgeoisie, its predominant inclination to adapt itself to the powers that be, and its anxiety to "get on in life." This stratum constitutes the most favourable soil for outright reformists and opportunists. Notwithstanding their superficial difference, these last two strata of the working class constitute a more or less common nutritive medium for opportunism in general—open opportunism, when the sentiments of the labour aristocracy gain the upper hand, and opportunism camouflaged with "Left" phrases, when the sentiments of the semi-middle-class strata of the working class which have not yet completely broken with the petty-bourgeois environment gain the upper hand. The fact that "ultra-Left" sentiments very often coincide with the sentiments of open opportunism is not at all surprising. Lenin said time and again that the "ultra-Left" opposition is the reverse side of the Right-wing, Menshevik, openly opportunist opposition. And that is quite true. If the "ultra-Lefts" stand for revolution only because they expect the victory of the revolution the very next day, then obviously they must fall into despair and be disillusioned in the revolution if the revolution is delayed, if the revolution is not victorious the very next day. Naturally, with every turn in the development of the class struggle, with every sharpening of the struggle and intensification of difficulties, the differences in the views, customs and sentiments of the various strata of the proletariat must inevitably make themselves felt in the shape of definite disagreements within the party, and the pressure of the bourgeoisie and its ideology must inevitably accentuate these disagreements by providing them with an outlet in the form of a struggle within the proletarian party.

Josip Broz Tito: There is no struggle against Fascism without struggle against its Trotskyist form.

Rabindranath Tagore: If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out.

Rabindranath Tagore: The real frienship is like fluorescence, it shines better when everything has darken.

Rabindranath Tagore: That one who talks so much is completely hollow, you know that the empty pitcher is the one that sounds the most.

Rabindranath Tagore: The woods would be quiet if no bird sang but the one that sang best.

Rabindranath Tagore: If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.

Rabindranath Tagore: Thank the flame for its light, but do not forget the lampholder standing in the shade with constancy of patience.

Rabindranath Tagore: Set bird's wings with gold and it will never again soar in the sky.

Rabindranath Tagore: So for men to accept is truly to give: for women to give is truly to gain.

Helen Keller: Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.

Albert Einstein: Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

Che Guevara: Brave is he who has more shame than fear.

John Brown: I have only a short time to live, only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause. There will be no peace in this land until slavery is done for.

John Brown: These men are all talk. What we need is action—action!

Mahmoud Darwish: The wars will end and the leaders will shake hands, and that old woman will remain waiting for her martyred son, and that girl will wait for her beloved husband, and the children will wait for their heroic father, I do not know who sold the homeland but I know who paid the price.

John Brown: Slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than the most barbarous, unprovoked and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens against another portion, the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment and hopeless servitude, or absolute extermination, in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky: In 1939, a very dangerous situation for the USSR had been created in Europe. Having seized Czechoslovakia and Austria, the German fascists were preparing to seize other states. At this time, many capitalist states incited Germany to direct its military forces against the USSR, to attack us. The foreign newspapers of the capitalist states openly wrote that Germany could seize everything she needed in the East, that is, in the USSR: land, raw materials, food, ore, oil, cotton, and the like. What was the Soviet state to do then? Go to war with Germany? At that time, such a war would have been even more dangerous for the Soviet state. The Soviet Government and the Bolshevik Party, headed by Comrade Stalin, did everything to avoid war. We knew that this war would be very difficult. If we had gone to such a war then, the position of the Soviet state would have been much more dangerous than it is now. Comrade Stalin has already answered the question whether the Soviet Government did the right thing by signing in 1939 a non-aggression pact (that is, a treaty) with the fascist government of Germany. “One may ask,” said Comrade Stalin, “how could it have happened that the Soviet Government agreed to conclude a non-aggression pact with such treacherous people and monsters as Hitler and Ribbentrop? Was there not a mistake on the part of the Soviet Government here? Of course not! A non-aggression pact is a peace pact between two states. It was precisely such a pact that Germany proposed to us in 1939. Could the Soviet Government refuse such a proposal? I think that no peace-loving state can refuse a peace agreement with a neighboring power, even if such monsters and cannibals as Hitler and Ribbentrop are at the head of this power. And this, of course, under one indispensable condition: that the peace agreement does not affect either directly or indirectly the territorial integrity, independence and honor of the peace-loving states.” This agreement lasted a year and a half, during which time Hitler repeatedly stated that he would never fight against the USSR. So on August 25, 1939, he told the British Ambassador Henderson that “Russia and Germany will never again take up arms against each other.” On September 1, 1939, he spoke in the German parliament: “Russia and Germany fought against each other during the world war! It shouldn not and will not happen a second time.” These were treacherous, false words, because Hitler was preparing to attack the USSR at the same time.

Vasily Lanovoy: In Europe, journalists asked me: 'Why do you celebrate Victory Day like that? We have already forgotten it. I asked them, "How many days did your countries resist Hitler?" They are silent.

Naomi Klein: The only thing I can imagine more horrific than this live-streamed genocide would be a world in which that became normal.

Enver Hoxha: Israel was artificially created by Zionism and imperialism at the expense of the Palestinian people. To abolish a nation in the name of a nationality of dubious authenticity is condemned by the peoples and will result in a bloody national liberation war.

Nicolás Maduro: Marxism is the study of concrete reality, with concrete solutions, based on an understanding of dialectics, so that it is a scientific knowledge that arises from reality.

Georges Braque: Truth exists; only lies are invented.

Georg C. Lichtenberg: It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple.

Saramago: The fascists of the future will not have that stereotype of Hitler or Mussolini. They will not have that tough military gesture. They will be men talking about everything the majority wants to hear. About goodness, family, good manners, religion and ethics. In that hour, the new devil will emerge, and few will perceive that history is repeating itself.

Louise Michel: The revolution will be the flowering of humanity as love is the flowering of the heart.

Peter Ustinov: In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.

Peter Ustinov: Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.

Bertolt Brecht: Fascism is not the opposite of democracy but its evolution in times of crisis.

Ghassan Kanafani: If we fail to defend our cause, then we should change the defenders, not the cause.