Protestation

Arthur Conan Doyle: When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Tamara Bunke: There is nothing more beautiful than to be in the middle of a critical situation, where the revolutionary struggle is the most difficult. How many would like to be here in Cuba to participate in defense of the Cuban revolution! I'm lucky enough to be able to do so. This is why I returned to Latin America. If I were interested in living well, surrounded by all the comforts, I would have stayed in Berlin, where I had everything. The Latin American revolution is advancing steadily toward a higher level, and I am fortunate enough to take part of it! ... Patria o muerte! Venceremos!

Karl Marx: The relations of private property contain latent within them the relation of private property as labour, the relation of private property as capital, and the mutual relation of these two to one another. There is the production of human activity as labour – that is, as an activity quite alien to itself, to man and to nature, and therefore to consciousness and the expression of life – the abstract existence of man as a mere workman who may therefore daily fall from his filled void into the absolute void – into his social, and therefore actual, non-existence. On the other hand, there is the production of the object of human activity as capital – in which all the natural and social characteristic of the object is extinguished; in which private property has lost its natural and social quality (and therefore every political and social illusion, and is not associated with any apparently human relations); in which the selfsame capital remains the same in the most diverse natural and social manifestations, totally indifferent to its real content. This contradiction, driven to the limit, is of necessity the limit, the culmination, and the downfall of the whole private-property relationship.

Gary Webb: The government side of the story is coming through the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post... They use the giant corporate press rather than saying anything directly. If you work through friendly reporters on major newspapers, it comes off as The New York Times saying it and not a mouthpiece of the CIA.

Leslie Feinberg: Remember me as a revolutionary communist.

François Mauriac: I have no desire to play in a world where everyone cheats.

François Mauriac: How little it costs to build castles in the air and how expensive is their destruction!

İbrahim Kaypakkaya: While the imperialist countries export capital to developing countries, building railways, factories, etc. All they care about are the high interest rates, low land prices, low wages, cheap raw materials, and their main purpose is to have unrivaled ownership of all the land and raw materials, to colonize them, and to enslave the working people. This is the main character and purpose of imperialism.

Karl Marx: The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations. Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas; the only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement — mors immortalis. ( From Lucretius's poem On The Nature of Things: "mortalem vitam mars immortalis ademit" ("moral life has been usurped by death the immortal").)

Karl Marx: The more the antagonistic character comes to light, the more the economists, the scientific representatives of bourgeois production, find themselves in conflict with their own theory; and different schools arise.

Lenin: Socialists must centre their activity on the struggle against reformism, which has always corrupted the revolutionary labour movement by injecting bourgeois ideas.

Lenin: Here we come to the most urgent question of our movement, to its sore point-organisation. The improvement of revolutionary organisation and discipline, the perfection of our underground technique are an absolute necessity.

Peter Gelderloos: Perhaps the largest of the limited, if not hollow, victories of the civil rights movement came when black people demonstrated they would not remain peaceful forever.

Peter Gelderloos: Prevent violence on the part of black nationalist groups. This is of primary importance, and is, of course, a goal of our investigative activity; it should also be a goal of the Counterintelligence Program (in the original government lingo, that phrase refers to a specific operation, of which there were thousands, and not the overarching program). Through counterintelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence.

Peter Gelderloos: As part of a disturbingly universal pattern, pacifists white out those other forms of resistance and help propagate the false history that Gandhi and his disciples were the lone masthead and rudder of Indian resistance. Ignored are important militant leaders such as Chandrasekhar Azad, who fought in armed struggle against the British colonizers, and revolutionaries such as Bhagat Singh, who won mass support for bombings and assassinations as part of a struggle to accomplish the ‘overthrow of both foreign and Indian capitalism.

Peter Gelderloos: The liberation movement in India failed. The British were not forced to quit India. Rather, they chose to transfer the territory from direct colonial rule to neocolonial rule,” What kind of victory allows the losing side to dictate the time and manner of the victors’ ascendancy? The British authored the new constitution and turned power over to handpicked successors. They fanned the flames of religious and ethnic separatism so that India would be divided against itself, prevented from gaining peace and prosperity, and dependent on military aid and other support from Euro/American states.” India is still exploited by Euro/American corporations (though several new Indian corporations, mostly subsidiaries, have joined in the pillaging), and still provides resources and markets for the imperialist states. In many ways the poverty of its people has deepened and the exploitation has become more efficient.

Peter Gelderloos: If the Palestinians hadn’t made the Israeli occupation and every successive aggression so costly, all the Palestinian land would be seized, except for a few reservations to hold the necessary number of surplus laborers to supplement the Israeli economy, and the Palestinians would be a distant memory in a long line of extinct peoples. Palestinian resistance, including suicide bombings, has helped ensure Palestinian survival against a far more powerful enemy.

Peter Gelderloos: Nonviolence declares that the American Indians could have fought off Columbus, George Washington, and all the other genocidal butchers with sit-ins; that Crazy Horse, by using violent resistance, became part of the cycle of violence, and was “as bad as” Custer. Nonviolence declares that Africans could have stopped the slave trade with hunger strikes and petitions, and that those who mutinied were as bad as their captors; that mutiny, a form of violence, led to more violence, and, thus, resistance led to more enslavement.

Peter Gelderloos: Pretending that all violence is the same is very convenient for supposedly anti-violence privileged people who benefit from the violence of the state and have much to lose from the violence of revolution.

Benjamin Netanyahu: We own the Senate, the Congress, and we have a record-strong Jewish lobby on our side. We have a strong influence over the general support. America won’t force us into anything.

Peter Gelderloos: Put simply, if a movement is not a threat, it cannot change a system based on centralized coercion and violence.

Peter Gelderloos: The state is not a passive thing. If it wants to repress a movement or organization, it does not wait for an excuse, it manufactures one (…) About such campaigns, the FBI says, “It is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge….(D)isruption (through the media) can be accomplished without facts to back it up.

Peter Gelderloos: Permitting nonviolent protest improves the image of the state. Whether they mean to or not, nonviolent dissidents play the role of a loyal opposition in a performance that dramatizes dissent and creates the illusion that democratic government is not elitist or authoritarian. Pacifists paint the state as benign by giving authority the chance to tolerate a criticism that does not actually threaten its continued operation.

Peter Gelderloos: In its long history, this strategy type has not succeeded in causing the class of owners, managers, and enforcers to defect and be disobedient, because their interests are fundamentally opposed to the interests of those who participate in the disobedience. What disobedience strategies have succeeded in doing, time and time again, is forcing out particular government regimes, though these are always replaced by other regimes constituted from among the elite.

Karl Marx: Is that to say 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 the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions in a single group, where they will stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletariat.

Thomas Jefferson: The bank mania... is raising up a moneyed aristocracy in our country which has already set the government at defiance, and although forced at length to yield a little on this first essay of their strength, their principles are unyielded and unyielding. These have taken deep root in the hearts of that class from which our legislators are drawn, and the sop to Cerberus from fable has become history. Their principles lay hold of the good, their pelf of the bad, and thus those whom the Constitution had placed as guards to its portals, are sophisticated or suborned from their duties.

Thomas Jefferson: ...I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Goethe: Everywhere revolutions are painful yet fruitful gestations of a people: they shed blood but create light, they eliminate men but elaborate ideas.

Che Guevara: When hopes and dreams are loose in the street, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed.

David Ben Gurion: If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: We have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?

Abraham Lincoln: The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life.

John F. Kennedy: All oppressed people are authorized, wherever they can, to rise and break their fetters.

Thomas Jefferson: If the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.

Peter Gelderloos: The elite cannot be persuaded by appeals to their conscience. Individuals who do change their minds and find a better morality will be fired, impeached, replaced, recalled, assassinated.

Peter Gelderloos: Besides the fact that the typical pacifist is quite clearly white and middle class (sic), pacifism as an ideology comes from a privileged context. It ignores that violence is already here; that violence is an unavoidable, structurally integral part of the current social hierarchy; and that it is people of color who are most affected by that violence.

Aristotle: Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

Rosa Luxemburg: Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.

George Orwell: As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British government. So he will be to the Japanese if they get there. Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.

Camus: With rebellion, awareness is born.

Mahatma Gandhi: An unjust law is itself a species of violence.

Edmund Burke: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Mahatma Gandhi: What is obtained through violence can only be kept through violence.

Bertrand Russell: Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

Karl Marx: While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far - not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world - that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one.

Charles Eliot Norton: The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent.

First Amendment: Thus if the First Amendment means anything in this field, it must allow protests even against the moral code that the standard of the day sets for the community. In other words, literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.

Henry Steele Commager: Our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past while we silence the rebels of the present.

Eugene V. Debs: While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Samuel Gompers: To be free, the workers must have choice. To have choice, they must retain in their own hands the right to determine under what conditions they will work.

Kwame Ture: The liberal is so preoccupied with stopping confrontation that he usually finds himself defending and calling for law and order, the law and order of the oppressor.

A. Philip Randolph: Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted. Freedom and justice must be struggled for by the oppressed of all lands and races...

You have the watches, but we have the time. (Afghan proverb) - anonymous

Mao Zedong: A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. A rural revolution is a revolution by which the peasantry overthrows the power of the feudal landlord class.

Mao Zedong: Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency.

Napoleon Bonaparte: A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets.

Goethe: A great revolution is never the fault of the people, but of the government.

Abraham Lincoln: This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

Gilbert Scott-Heron: The Revolution will not be televised. The Revolution will be no rerun, brothers. The Revolution - will be live.

Thomas Jefferson: I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. (...) It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

Camus: Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

Camus: Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.

Natalie Merchant: There is one tradition in America I am proud to inherit. It is our first freedom and the truest expression of our Americanism: the ability to dissent without fear. It is our right to utter the words, "I disagree." We must feel at liberty to speak those words to our neighbors, our clergy, our educators, our news media, our lawmakers and, above all, to the one among us we elect President.

Barbara Ehrenreich: No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

Jacob Bronowski: Dissent is the mark of freedom.

Wendell Phillips: Revolutions never go backwards.

Lewis F. Korns: The history of the human race always has been, and most likely always will be, that of evolution and revolution.

Edward Counsel: A constitution imperilled justifies revolution.

John Adams: As to the history of the revolution, my ideas may be peculiar, perhaps singular. What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected ... before a drop of blood was shed.

Muhammad Ali: Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.

Vaclav Havel: Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: We who in engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.

Edward R. Murrow: We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular.

Emmeline Pankhurst: We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.

Camus: What is a rebel? A man who says no.

Camus: The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

Marcus Tullius Cicero: Let the welfare of the people be the ultimate law.

G. W. F. Hegel: The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

Goethe: None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Nelson Mandela: It always seems impossible, until it is done.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: A riot is the language of the unheard.

Harriet Tubman: I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves.

Michael McFaul: In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible.

Fidel Castro: A revolution is not a trail of roses.... A revolution is a fight to the death between the future and the past.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

John F. Kennedy: Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

Desmond Tutu: If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

Malcolm X: You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker.

Henry Ford: If the people understood the banking system, there would be a revolution tomorrow.

Thomas Jefferson: Every generation needs a revolution.

Tupac Shakur: Standing up for your rights does not make you a radical, it makes you a human being.

Che Guevara: The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.

Wynton Marsalis: Many a revolution started with the actions of a few.

Eugene V. Debs: The most heroic word in all languages is REVOLUTION.

Rosa Luxemburg: History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat.

Karl Liebknecht: The basic law of capitalism is you or I, not both you and I.

Karl Marx: Workers of the world you have nothing to lose but your chains nothing to gain but your freedom. Workers of the world unite.

Malcolm X: Nonviolence is fine as long as it works.

Patrick Henry: Give me liberty or give me death.

Tupac Shakur: The desire to revolt against oppression is the highest desire there is.

Johann Most: Above all, what socialist, without flushing with shame, maintains he is not a revolutionary? We say: none!