Protestation

James Gilligan: The political rhetoric of the ruling class claims to want to decrease the rate of violence. It advocates making the deadliest weapons, from handguns to assault rifles, freely available to as many people as possible; increasing the rate of capital punishment; imprisoning as many people as possible; and making the conditions in which they are incarcerated more and more brutalizing; depriving prison inmates of the opportunity to acquire education which could help them to renounce their criminal violence. All this is pursued in the name of being "tough on crime" and "tough on criminals"; but however "tough" these policies may be on criminals, they are, in fact, the most effective way to promote crime and violence. This deceptive rhetoric still fools millions of voters. This brilliant strategy also labels those policies that would decrease the rates of crime and violence, as being "soft on crime.

James Gilligan: The traditional defense of class stratification and the existence of a "leisure class", ever since the rise of civilization, from both Plato and Aristotle as well as from more recent social thinkers, is that a leisure class is needed in order to have the time and energy for the specialized intellectual development and technological skills that are necessary preconditions for civilization; and "leisure class" has always meant a group with a guaranteed income — i.e. those who did not have to work for a living. Implicit in this argument is the assumption (which I happen to think is correct, as I think the history and development of civilization proves) that when people are freed from the necessity to work — that is, when work is freely chosen rather than slavery or wage-slavery (i.e. "work or starve"), they do not just vegetate in a state of "passivity and dependency." Rather, they engage in much more creative work. Coercion creates an incentive for "passive aggressiveness," because when overpowered and helpless there is no other way to express the minimal degree of autonomy that people need in order to maintain any semblance of self-esteem, dignity, and pride. Furthermore, when work is a means to and end — working in order to eat — then it is, in Marx's terms, "alienated" labor. Labor can only be liberated from alienation when work is an end in itself, entered into freely as the expression of spontaneous and voluntary creativity, curiosity, playfulness, initiative, and sociability — that is, the sense of solidarity with the community, the fulfillment of one's true and "essential" human nature as "social" and "political" animals, to be fulfilled and made human by their full participation in a culture. In short, the contradiction in the old defense of class stratification is that it defends leisure for the leisure class, but not for the underclass. With reference to the underclass, leisure is said to destroy the incentive to work, leads to slothfulness and self-indulgence, and retards cognitive and moral development. When applied to the leisure class, the concept evokes an image of Plato and Aristotle, whose leisure was based on slave labor, creating the intellectual foundations of Western civilization; or patrician slave-owners like Washington and Jefferson laying the foundations of American civilization; or creative aristocrats like Count Leo Tolstoy or Bertrand Ear Russell; or, even closer to home, of our own sons and daughters (or of ourselves, when we were young adults) being freed from the stultifying tasks of earning a living until well into our adult years so that we could study in expensive universities to gain specialized knowledge and skills.

Mahmoud Darwish: Workers united, a force that can't go wrong, Breaking chains of oppression, pushing for their rights,Their voices echoing, piercing through the nights.

Hugo Chávez: China is larger but not an Empire.

Friedrich Engels: How is the housing question to be solved then? In present-day society just as any other social question is solved: by the gradual economic adjustment of supply and demand, a solution which ever reproduces the question itself anew and therefore is no solution. How a social revolution would solve this question depends not only on the circumstances which would exist in each case, but is also connected with still more far-reaching questions, among which one of the most fundamental is the abolition of the antithesis between town and country. As it is not our task to create utopian systems for the arrangement of the future society, it would be more than idle to go into the question here. But one thing is certain: there are already in existence sufficient buildings for dwellings in the big towns to remedy immediately any real “housing shortage,” given rational utilization of them. This can naturally only take place by the expropriation of the present owners and by quartering in their houses the homeless or those workers excessively overcrowded in their former houses. Immediately the proletariat has conquered political power such a measure dictated in the public interests will be just as easy to carry out as other expropriations and billetings are by the existing state.

Marie Curie: You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.

George Orwell: There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Albert Camus: Maybe it's not about happy ending. Maybe it's about the story.

Karl Marx: We must announce to the governments: We know you are the armed power which is directed against the proletarians; we will move against you in peaceful way where it is possible, and with arms if it should become necessary.

Grace Blakeley: Free markets aren't really free. Record corporate pro­fits don't trickle down to everyone else. And we aren't empowered to make our own choices – they're made for us every day.

Stalin: Communist parties ought to be made independent, instead of sections of the CI. They should turn into national Communist parties with various names—the Workers’ Party, the Marxist Party, etc. The name does not matter. What matters is that they put down roots in their own peoples and concentrate on their own proper tasks. They ought to have a Communist program; they should proceed on a Marxist analysis, but without looking over their shoulders at Moscow; they should resolve the concrete problems they face in the given country independently. And the situation and problems in different countries are altogether different. In England there are certain ones, in Germany there are different ones, and so forth. Once the Communist parties have become stronger in this way, then reestablish their international organization.

Aldous Huxley: Christianity without tears - that's what soma is.

Milton Friedman: The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power - we must have a dispersion of power.

Henry Ford: Vision without execution is just hallucination.

Eduardo Galeano: From moles we learned to make tunnels. From beavers we learned to make dams. From birds we learned to build homes. From spiders we learned to weave. From tree trunks rolling downhill we learned about wheels. From tree trunks floating and adrift we learned about boats. From wind we learned about sails. How did we learn our evil ways? From whom did we learn to torment our neighbors and subdue the earth?

Lenin: You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.

Bible: And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

Bible: You are my son; today I have become your father. Ask me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. You will break them with a rod of iron; you will dash them to pieces like pottery.

Karl Marx: No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.

Karl Marx: In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

Bob Dylan: I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

Karl Marx: The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonisms, but of one arising from the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of society to a close.

Anton Chekhov: There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue; my heart aches from the consciousness that I am working for money, and money is the centre of all I do.

Enver Hoxha: [T]he defence of the theory and practice of scientific socialism from the attacks and distortions of modern revisionists of various hues and tints and other bourgeois and petty-bourgeois trends is one of the most important tasks in the ideological struggle today.

Augusto Pinochet: The rich people are those who create wealth, and you have to treat them well so they continue to give wealth.

Enver Hoxha: The counter-revolutionary theories and practices of the revisionists serve as nourishment for the most diverse hostile ideological trends, ranging from the most reactionary bourgeois trends to the Trotskyite and petty-bourgeois ones. The bourgeois ideologists deliberately try to present the [Khrushchevite] revisionist betrayal as a failure of socialism and Marxism-Leninism, as if communism is unable to provide a positive alternative for the solution of the problems of the world today.

Enver Hoxha: There are … some petty-bourgeois ideologists and people of sincere revolutionary inclinations who, disillusioned by the [Khrushchevite] revisionist betrayal, are questioning the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism and trying to create new theories or to revive old ones. They preach that Marxism-Leninism is incomplete and inaccurate, that allegedly it no longer responds to the new historical conditions of various countries or continents. In this situation, when the ideological confusion which the modern revisionists caused and are seeking to keep alive has become more pronounced, the great importance of the struggle of all the Marxist-Leninists for the liberation of the working class and labouring masses from all the influences of bourgeois and revisionist ideology and of the various petty-bourgeois trends, the arming of them with the only scientific ideology, Marxism-Leninism, emerges very clearly.

Enver Hoxha: Rigid and sectarian attitudes also damage the line of the Party. In the recent times such attitudes have been apparent among some communists and cadres who, when the Party exposed and condemned elements with a liberal, opportunist and hostile spirit, began to look with undue suspicion even at some small and unimportant blemish. The tendencies observed sometimes in some people to resort to administrative methods where persuasion and education should be used are also sectarian. Those who display sectarian tendencies often pose as “consistent and principled revolutionaries”. But in fact they are opportunists and act in this way in order to be “on the safe side”. These opportunist vacillations stem from lack of a correct grasp of the nature of the two types of contradictions which exist in our society, from confusing antagonistic with non-antagonistic contradictions. The Party must make these matters completely clear and explain that opportunism cannot be fought with success if sectarianism is not fought at the same time, and vice-versa.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

Albert Einstein: What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?

Aristotle: A friend to all is a friend to none.

Big Bill Haywood: If the workers are organized, all they have to do is to put their hands in their pockets and they have got the capitalist class whipped.

Augusto Pinochet: If Senator Kennedy is elected President of the United States, the government of Chile will take the necessary measures.

Augusto Pinochet: Not a single leaf moves in this country if I'm not the one moving it. I want that to be clear!

Augusto Pinochet: This is not a dictadura [dictatorship/hard rule] but a dictablanda [soft rule].

Augusto Pinochet: The nation is trying to make Chile a country of proprietors, not of proletarians.

Augusto Pinochet: I'm looking at them from above, because God put me there.

Mao Zedong: Don't you want to abolish state power?" Yes, we do, but not right now; we cannot do it yet. Why? Because imperialism still exists, because domestic reaction still exists, because classes still exist in our country. Our present task is to strengthen the people's state apparatus -- mainly the people's army, the people's police and the people's courts -- in order to consolidate national defence and protect the people's interests. Given this condition, China can develop steadily, under the leadership of the working class and the Communist Party, from an agricultural into an industrial country and from a new-democratic into a socialist and communist society, can abolish classes and realize the Great Harmony.

Saramago: Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions. Decisions make us.

Saramago: We live in a very peculiar world. Democracy isn’t discussed, as if it was taken for granted, as if democracy had taken God’s place, who is also not discussed.

Saramago: We’re not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations.

Saramago: We are marching against the law of the jungle that the United States and its acolytes old and new want to impose on the world...

Saramago: From literature to ecology, from the escape velocity of galaxies to the greenhouse effect, from garbage disposal methods to traffic jams, everything is discussed in our world. But the democratic system, as if it were a given fact, untouchable by nature until the end of time, we don’t discuss that.

Saramago: But truths need to be repeated many times so that they don’t, poor things, lapse into oblivion.

Saramago: Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.

Saramago: That it’s possible not to see a lie even when it’s in front of us.

Saramago: Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974.

Saramago: There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is.

Saramago: The problem is that the right doesn’t need any ideas to govern, but the left can’t govern without ideas.

Saramago: I can’t imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement.

Karl Marx: Since the production and the circulation of commodities are the general pre-requisites of the capitalist mode of production, division of labour in manufacture demands, that division of labour in society at large should previously have attained a certain degree of development. Inversely, the former division reacts upon and develops and multiplies the latter. Simultaneously, with the differentiation of the instruments of labour, the industries that produce these instruments, become more and more differentiated.

Karl Marx: On the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

Thomas Sankara: With immense despair and sorrow, we received the sad news of the passing of Comrade Enver Hoxha.

George Orwell: Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

Marwan Makhoul: In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political I must listen to the birds and in order to hear the birds the warplanes must be silent.

Bible: For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light.

Friedrich Hayek: “Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.

Bob Marley: The people who were trying to make this world worse are not taking the day off. Why should I?

Robert Mugabe: The support and inspiration Comrade Enver Hoxha provided to the people of Zimbabwe during their struggle for liberation will be remembered forever.

György Lukács: [T]he proletariat is the first oppressed class in history that has been capable of countering the oppressors’ philosophy with an independent and higher world-view of its own.

Friedrich Engels: Our view, which we have found confirmed by long practice, is that the correct tactic in propaganda is not to draw away a few individuals and members here and there from one's opponent, but to work on the great mass which still remains apathetic. The primitive force of a single individual whom we have ourselves attracted from the crude mass is worth more than ten Lassallean renegades, who always bring the seeds of their false tendencies into the Party with them.

James Connolly: War is a relic of barbarism only possible because we are governed by a ruling class with barbaric ideas; the working class of all countries cannot hope to escape the horrors of war until, in all countries, that barbaric ruling class is thrown from power.

Stalin: In 1917 the chain of the imperialist world front proved to be weaker in Russia than in the other countries. It was there that the chain broke and provided an outlet for the proletarian revolution. Why? Because in Russia a great popular revolution was unfolding, and at its head marched the revolutionary proletariat, which had such an important ally as the vast mass of the peasantry, which was oppressed and exploited by the landlords. Because the revolution there was opposed by such a hideous representative of imperialism as tsarism, which lacked all moral prestige and was deservedly hated by the whole population. The chain proved to be weaker in Russia, although Russia was less developed in a capitalist sense than, say, France or Germany, Britain or America. Where will the chain break in the near future? Again, where it is weakest. It is not precluded that the chain may break, say, in India. Why? Because that country has a young, militant, revolutionary proletariat, which has such an ally as the national liberation movement -- an undoubtedly powerful and undoubtedly important ally. Because there the revolution is confronted by such a well-known foe as foreign imperialism, which has no moral credit and is deservedly hated by all the oppressed and exploited masses of India. It is also quite possible that the chain will break in Germany. Why? Because the factors which are operating, say, in India are beginning to operate in Germany as well, but, of course, the enormous difference in the level of development between India and Germany cannot but stamp its imprint on the progress and outcome of a revolution in Germany.

Karl Marx: It requires a fully developed production of commodities before, from accumulated experience alone, the scientific conviction springs up, that all the different kinds of private labour, which are carried on independently of each other, and yet as spontaneously developed branches of the social division of labour, are continually being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society requires them. And why? Because, in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.[29] The determination of the magnitude of value by labour time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities.

Marcus Aurelius: The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.

Karl Marx: It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated in a mass, in the shape of capital, at the one pole of society, while at the other are grouped masses of men, who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Neither is it enough that they are compelled to sell it voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class, which by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature. The organisation of the capitalist process of production, once fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus-population keeps the law of supply and demand of labour, and therefore keeps wages, in a rut that corresponds with the wants of capital. The dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist. Direct force, outside economic conditions, is of course still used, but only exceptionally. In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can be left to the “natural laws of production,” i.e., to his dependence on capital, a dependence springing from, and guaranteed in perpetuity by, the conditions of production themselves. It is otherwise during the historic genesis of capitalist production. The bourgeoisie, at its rise, wants and uses the power of the state to “regulate” wages, i.e., to force them within the limits suitable for surplus-value making, to lengthen the working-day and to keep the labourer himself in the normal degree of dependence. This is an essential element of the so-called primitive accumulation.

Shakespeare: We are oft to blame in this, - 'tis too much proved, - that with devotion's visage, and pious action we do sugar o'er the devil himself.

Enver Hoxha: I pledge before the flag and my pioneer comrades that I will always learn, work and live as a worthy son of the Party and the Homeland.

Theodore Roosevelt: When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not Guilty'.

Robert A. Heinlein: You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.

James Douglas Morrison: The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.

Al Capone: They can't collect legal taxes from illegal money.