Protestation

Thomas Sankara: Our families have stopped producing, because they can not sell what they produce. The surplus from farmers in other countries is brought in here. We want something else. Those who really want to help us can give us ploughs, tractors, fertilizer, insecticide, watering cans, drills, dams. That is how we would define food aid. But those who come with wheat, millet, corn or milk are not helping us.

Kim Jong-Il: Thanks to Marx's outstanding contribution, the working class could have their own scientific world outlook for the first time.

William Montgomery Brown: Marx though dead yet speaketh. He is speaking more widely and persuasively in death than in life.

Karl Marx: The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation lies unveiled before our eyes turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.

Che Guevara: Incidentally, here one must introduce a general attitude toward one of the most controversial terms of the modern world: Marxism. When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist or a biologist when asked if he is a ‘Newtonian,’ or if he is a ‘Pasteurian’.

Kim Jong-Un: Socialism emerges victorious if it holds fast to its ideology, and if it does not, it collapses.

Edgar Snow: Only the blind can now deny," he wrote in 1944, "that the triumph of the Red Army is the triumph of Soviet socialism, and above all, Soviet planning.

George L. Jackson: The fascists already have power. The point is that some way must be found to expose them and combat them. An electoral choice of ten different fascists is like choosing which way one wishes to die.

Ibrahim Traoré: Burkina Faso is not a democracy, it is a revolution and revolutions are not built on comfort, they are built on vigilance, sacrifice and survival.

Ortega y Gasset: I am myself and my circumstances.

Xi Jinping: Marxism is and will continue to be the guiding theory for our Party and nation.

Hitler: Give me ten years, and you will not recognise Germany.

Fidel Castro: We always know where the soldiers are, but they never know where we are. We can come and go as we like, moving through their lines, but they can never find us unless we wish them to, and then it is only on our terms.

Goethe: Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

Lenin: In a country ruled by an autocracy, with a completely enslaved press, in a period of desperate political reaction in which even the tiniest outgrowth of political discontent and protest is persecuted, the theory of revolutionary Marxism suddenly forced its way into the censored literature before the government realised what had happened and the unwieldy army of censors and gendarmes discovered the new enemy and flung itself upon him.

Cornelius Tacitus: Once killing starts, it is difficult to draw the line.

Pope Francis: If i see the gospel in a sociological way only, yes, I am a communist, and so too is Jesus.

Che Guevara: Ever since monopoly capital took over the world, it has kept the greater part of humanity in poverty, dividing all the profits among the group of the most powerful countries. The standard of living in those countries is based on the extreme poverty of our countries. To raise the living standards of the underdeveloped nations, therefore, we must fight against imperialism. And each time a country is torn away from the imperialist tree, it is not only a partial battle won against the main enemy but it also contributes to the real weakening of that enemy, and is one more step toward the final victory. There are no borders in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, because a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory, just as any country’s defeat is a defeat for all of us. The practice of proletarian internationalism is not only a duty for the peoples struggling for a better future, it is also an inescapable necessity. If the imperialist enemy, the United States or any other, carries out its attack against the underdeveloped peoples and the socialist countries, elementary logic determines the need for an alliance between the underdeveloped peoples and the socialist countries. If there were no other uniting factor, the common enemy should be enough. Of course, these alliances cannot be made spontaneously, without discussions, without birth pangs, which sometimes can be painful. We said that each time a country is liberated it is a defeat for the world imperialist system. But we must agree that the break is not achieved by the mere act of proclaiming independence or winning an armed victory in a revolution. It is achieved when imperialist economic domination over a people is brought to an end. Therefore, it is a matter of vital interest to the socialist countries for a real break to take place. And it is our international duty, a duty determined by our guiding ideology, to contribute our efforts to make this liberation as rapid and deep-going as possible.

Simón Bolívar: We have been ruled more by deceit than by force, and we have been degraded more by vice than by superstition. Slavery is the daughter of darkness: an ignorant people is a blind instrument of its own destruction.

Aleka Papariga: Nowadays in the modern capitalist societies, in the societies of monopoly capitalism, the material preconditions for the transition to socialism-communism have matured to a great extent, namely there is concentration of production and working class. Unevenness is definitely an important element for the designation of strategic duties e.g. alliances, prediction of the chain that can accelerate the intensification of the contradictions. Nevertheless, unevenness does not justify a different strategic goal, namely a state power different from the workers’ state power; it does not justify an intermediate power between the capitalist and the worker’s state power. The class character of the worker’s state power that the communist party strives is given. Of course it will have to pursue a policy of alliances and maneuver in order to gather and prepare forces.

Benjamin Netanyahu: Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time - he wanted to expel the Jews.

Edmund Burke: Fear is the most ignorant, the most insulting and the cruelest of counselors. There is nothing beneficial when we are guided by fear.

Edmund Burke: Education is the best defense of nations.

Simón Bolívar: Flee the country where a lone man holds all power: It is a nation of slaves.

Simón Bolívar: A state too expensive in itself, or by virtue of its dependencies, ultimately falls into decay; its free government is transformed into a tyranny; it disregards the principles which it should preserve, and finally degenerates into despotism. The distinguishing characteristic of small republics is stability: the character of large republics is mutability.

Stalin: The proletariat cannot achieve socialism by making peace with the bourgeoisie — it must unfailingly take the path of struggle, and this struggle must be a class struggle, a struggle of the entire proletariat against the entire bourgeoisie. Either the bourgeoisie and its capitalism, or the proletariat and its socialism! That must be the basis of the proletariat's actions, of its class struggle.

Ibrahim Traoré: We are reclaiming our sovereignty with courage, not permission. Africa must stand on its feet, not knees.

Big Bill Haywood: The capitalist has no heart, but harpoon him in the pocketbook and you will draw blood.

Ibrahim Traoré: If Killing and abducting peaceful protesters in your country is what you call democracy, then I don't want it.

Ibrahim Traoré: Leading a country is a privilege, not a business opportunity.

Ibrahim Traoré: Democracy is not where you begin—it’s what comes after revolution.

Lenin: Engels was a thousand times right when he wrote that to conceive equality as meaning anything beyond the abolition of classes is a very stupid and absurd prejudice. Bourgeois professors have tried to make use of the concept of equality to accuse us of wanting to make all men equal to one another. They have tried to accuse the socialists of this absurdity, which they themselves invented. But in their ignorance they did not know that the socialists — and precisely the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels — said: Equality is an empty phrase unless equality is understood to mean the abolition of classes. We want to abolish classes, and in this respect we stand for equality. But the claim that we want to make all men equal to one another is an empty phrase and a stupid invention of intellectuals.

Friedrich Engels: Social-chauvinism and opportunism are the same in their political essence; class collaboration, repudiation of the proletarian dictatorship, rejection of revolutionary action, obeisance to bourgeois legality, non-confidence in the proletariat, and confidence in the bourgeoisie. The political ideas are identical, and so is the political content of their tactics.

Karl Marx: Ever since the first report reached us of English hostilities in China, the Government journals of England and a portion of the American Press have been heaping wholesale denunciations upon the Chinese.

Karl Marx: England has subverted the conditions of Irish society. At first it confiscated the land then it suppressed the industry by ‘Parliamentary enactments’, and lastly, it broke the active energy by armed force.

Anatole France: You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists.

Khalil Gibran: They tell me: If you see a slave sleeping, do not wake him lest he be dreaming of freedom. I tell them: If you see a slave sleeping, wake him and explain to him freedom.

Mahdi Amel: Sects, in their political existence, exist within and not without the bourgeois state. There is no political presence for them except in this state, which is, by its very class nature, a sectarian state.

Xi Jinping: It was the cannon blast of the October Revolution that brought Marxism-Leninism to China offering a new choice for the Chinese people who were seeking a way to save China from subjugation.

Patrice Lumumba: No brutality, mistreatment, or torture has ever forced me to ask for grace, for I prefer to die with my head high, my faith steadfast, and my confidence profound in the destiny of my country, rather than to live in submission and scorn of sacred principles.

Thomas Henry Huxley: Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

Ibrahim Traoré: I don't want my people to relocate to foreign countries in search of greener pastures, Africa is the richest continent in the world just that we fail to exploit our resources.

Victor Hugo: It produces an immense sadness to think that nature speaks while mankind does not listen to it.

Malcolm X: The slave master no longer has to whip, shoot, lynch, rape, poison, and brainwash you... he has taught you to do it to yourself.

Stalin: Who does not know that pious talk of peace, as a camouflage for resolute support of a policy of war and conquest, is one of the old, old imperialist methods of deceiving the masses?

Salvador Allende: It is not enough for everyone to be equal before the law. It is necessary that the law be equal before everyone.

Albert Einstein: Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

Paul Lafargue: Middle-class idealism is far more dangerous than Christianity; it is with its divinities – property, liberty, justice, order, country, &c., that all the middle-class freethinkers and Catholics, priest-eaters, Jew-baiters, republicans and monarchists, Radicals and Ministerial Socialists will stupefy the brains of the workers and turn them aside from the class struggle.

André Gide: It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.

Jordan Maxwell: Nothing in this world operates the way you think it does. Banks do not loan money, governments are not empowered to protect you, the police department is not there to serve you, institutions of higher learning, colleges and educational institutes, are not there to educate you. The entire superstructure of civilization in the Western world is a combination of brilliantly put together and planned, well-planned, schemes to direct the minds of the people in such a way as to serve their masters.

Zapata: The land belongs to those who work it.

Lenin: Fulfilling the task with which it has been charged by the capitalists of all countries, German militarism wants to strangle the Russian and Ukrainian workers and peasants, to return the land to the landowners, the mills and factories to the bankers, and power to the monarchy.

Kwame Nkrumah: Africa is not poor, it is Africans that are poor.

Stalin: The workers of the Soviet Union are merely carrying out their duty in giving help within their power to the revolutionary masses of Spain. They are aware that the liberation of Spain from the yoke of fascist reactionaries is not a private affair of the Spanish people but the common cause of the whole of advanced and progressive mankind.

Stalin: Never refuse to do the little things, for from little things are built the big thing’s this is one of Lenin’s important behests.

Stalin: Remember, love and study Lenin, our teacher and leader.

Stalin: Fight and vanquish the enemies, internal and foreign—as Lenin taught us.

Stalin: Build the new life, the new way of existence, the new culture—as Lenin taught us.

Utpal Dutt: Revolutionary theatre should propagate revolution. It should not only expose the system, but also call for a violent end to State machinery.

Lê Duẩn: We are completely confident that the invincible banner of Marxism-Leninism will certainly take the revolutionary cause of the world’s people and of Việt Nam to splendid successes.

Eugene V. Debs: The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle.

Karl Marx: The moderation of the Commune during the two months of undisputed sway is equalled only by the heroism of its defence. What does that prove? Why, that for months the Commune carefully hid, under a mask of moderation and humanity, the bloodthirstiness of its fiendish instincts to be let loose in the hour of its agony!

Karl Marx: The working men’s Paris, in the act of its heroic self-holocaust, involved in its flames buildings and monuments. While tearing to pieces the living body of the proletariat, its rulers must no longer expect to return triumphantly into the intact architecture of their abodes. The government of Versailles cries, “Incendiarism!” and whispers this cue to all its agents, down to the remotest hamlet, to hunt up its enemies everywhere as suspect of professional incendiarism. The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar!

Lenin: The bourgeoisie needs lackeys whom a section of the working class could trust, and who would paint in fine colors, embellish the bourgeoisie with talk about the possibility of the reformist path, who would throw dust in the eyes of the people by this talk, who would divert the people from revolution by depicting in glowing colors the charms and the possibilities of the reformist path.

Kwame Ture: What a liberal really wants is to bring about change that will not in any way endanger his position.

Alain Badiou: Love and politics are the two great figures of social engagement. Politics is enthusiasm with a collective; with love, two people. So love is the minimal form of communism.

Albert Einstein: Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.

Subcomandante Marcos: We are sorry for the inconvenience, but this is a revolution.

Subcomandante Marcos: Don Quixote is the best book out there on political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth.

William Z. Foster: Hitler needed fascism for his program of world conquest and so does Wall Street.

Giacomo Matteotti: When the bourgeois class speaks of invasions and threats of the fatherland we cry down your homeland because history proves nothing easier than the fiction of assaults when you are assailants, of invaders when you want to invade and every army is an organ that necessarily requires the function of destroying attacking to attack.

Ibrahim Traoré: We are not in a democracy, we are in a revolution.

Lenin: Whoever expects a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.

Albert Einstein: The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.

Maxim Gorky: To speak the truth is the most difficult of all arts, for in its "pure" form, not connected with the interests of individuals, groups, classes, or nations, truth is almost completely unsuitable for use by the Philistine and is unacceptable to him.

Maxim Gorky: Writers build castles in the air, the reader lives inside, and the publisher inns the rent.

Maxim Gorky: You will not drown the truth in seas of blood.

Maxim Gorky: The intelligentsia ...was kept busy embroidering white stitches on the philosophical and ecclesiastical vestments of the bourgeoisie - that old and filthy fabric besmeared with the blood of toiling masses.

Maxim Gorky: Intellectual force is qualitatively the first and foremost productive force, and concern for its rapid growth should be the ardent concern of all classes.

Xi Jinping: Marxism has provided a strong theoretical weapon for the Chinese revolution, construction and reform, enabling China, an ancient country in the east, to create an unprecedented development miracle in the history of mankind.

Louise Michel: The role of schoolteachers is to give people the intellectual means to rebel.

Napoleon Bonaparte: He who saves his country does not violate any law.

Vincent van Gogh: I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

Alexandra Kollontai: When a woman’s wages are insufficient to keep her alive, the sale of favours seems a possible subsidiary occupation. The hypocritical morality of bourgeois society encourages prostitution by the structure of its exploitative economy, while at the same time mercilessly covering with contempt any girl or woman who is forced to take this path. The black shadow of prostitution stalks the legal marriage of bourgeois society. History has never before witnessed such a growth of prostitution as occurred in the last part of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. In Berlin there is one prostitute for every twenty so-called honest women. In Paris the ratio is one to eighteen and in London one to nine. There are different types of prostitution: there is open prostitution that is legal and subject to regulation, and there is the secret, “seasonal” type, All forms of prostitution flourish like a poisonous flower in the swamps of the bourgeois way of life. The world of the bourgeoisie does not even spare children, forcing young girls of nine and ten into the sordid embraces of wealthy and depraved old men. In the capitalist countries there are brothels which specialise exclusively in very young girls. In this present post-war period every woman faces the possibility of unemployment. Unemployment hits women in particular, and causes an enormous increase in the army of “street women”. Hungry crowds of women seeking out the buyers of “white slaves” flood the evening streets of Berlin. Paris and the other civilised centres of the capitalist states. The trade in women’s flesh is conducted quite openly, which is not surprising when you consider that the whole bourgeois way of life is based on buying and selling. There is an undeniable element of material and economic, considerations even the most legal of marriages. Prostitution is the way out for the woman who fails to find herself a permanent breadwinner. Prostitution, under capitalism provides men with the opportunity of having sexual relationships without having to take upon themselves the responsibility of caring materially for the women until the grave.

Xi Jinping: Liberalism has outlived its usefulness. Marxism-Leninism is barely getting started. Yet we are leading in Science. We are leading in Tech. We are leading in infrastructure. Marxism-Leninism doesn't build the future. We are the future.

Wu Zi: Those who like to go to war will perish; those who forget war will be in danger.

Stalin: Social-Democracy can be exposed and reduced to an insignificant minority in the working class only in the course of the day-to-day struggle for the concrete needs of the working class. The Social-Democrats must be pilloried not on the basis of planetary questions, but on the basis of the day-to-day struggle of the working class for improving its material and political conditions; in this, questions concerning wages, hours, housing conditions, insurance, taxation, unemployment, high cost of living, and so forth, must play a most important if not the decisive role. To hit the Social-Democrats day after day on the basis of these questions, exposing their treachery—such is the task.

Stalin: Mr. Churchill and his friends bear a striking resemblance to Hitler and his friends.

Kaysone Phomvihane: Only by advancing socialism will we be able to completely eliminate all forms of oppression, eliminate all forms of injustice and inequality, and build a foundation for a new life in which everyone will benefit from their labor.

Evald Vassilievich Ilyenkov: There is no rational doctrine opposed to communism but only an absence of one.

Evald Vassilievich Ilyenkov: "Western" criticism of present day communism, so far as a grain of rationality is to found in it, is in its entirety, even though only implicitly, self-criticism.

Nikolay Chernyshevsky: The worse, the better.

Xi Jinping: We need to be like Marx. We need to strive for Communism throughout our lives.

Xi Jinping: When Lenin led the October Revolution of 1917 to victory, Socialism transformed from theory to reality, thus breaking the global capitalist order which dominated the world.

Xi Jinping: Marx would be comforted to know that, Marxism has successfully guided China down the path toward fully developing into a great modern socialist country.

Pearl S. Buck: The desire for perfection makes some people totally unbearable.

Stalin: What would happen if the Communist Party of America did appeal for aid to the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R.? I think the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. would render it whatever assistance it could. Indeed, what would be the worth of the Communist Party, a Party which is in power, if it refused to do what it could to aid the Communist Party of another country laboring under the yoke of capitalism. I would say that such a Communist Party would not be worth a cent. Let us assume that the American working class had come into power after overthrowing its bourgeoisie. Let us assume that the working class of another country appealed to the working class of America, which had emerged victorious in a great struggle against capitalism, for material aid; would the American working class refuse it? I think it would disgrace itself if it hesitated to give the assistance asked for.

Ibrahim Traoré: They keep telling me I will die like Gaddafi, Thomas Sankara, or any young leader that tried to make Africa better. I am not scared, and I won't regret dying for my people.

Rousseau: Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors.

Lyndon B. Johnson: Did you ever think that making a speech on economy is a lot like pissing down your leg? It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.