Quotes
Democritus: 'Tis not in strength of body nor in gold that men find happiness, but in uprightness and in fulness of understanding.
Democritus: He who does wrong is more unhappy than he who suffers wrong.
Samuel P. Huntington: The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
Marjori Palmer: One of the most morale-damaging aspects of the inflation was the "sack of Germany" that occurred at the height of the (1923) inflation. Anyone who possessed dollars or sterling was king in Germany. A few American dollars would allow a man to live like a millionaire. Foreigners swarmed into the country, buying up family treasures, estates, jewelry and art works at unbelievable low prices.
Lionel Robbins: It was the most colossal thing of its kind in history: and next probably to the Great War itself, it must bear responsibility for many of the political and economic difficulties of our generation. It destroyed the wealth of the more solid elements of German society: and left behind a moral and economic disequilibrium, a breeding ground for the disasters which have followed. Hitler is the foster child of the inflation.
Lenin: There is no trace of utopianism in Marx, in the sense that he made up or invented a 'new' society. No, he studied the birth of the new society out of the old, and the forms of transition from the latter to the former, as a natural-historical process. He examined the actual experience of a proletarian mass movement and tried to draw practical lessons from it.
Che Guevara: Many will call me an adventurer - and that I am, only one of a different sort: one of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes.
Democritus: The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.
Bertolt Brecht: Lenin is enshrined In the large heart of the working class.
Wim Wenders: Every film is political. Most political of all are those that pretend not to be: “entertainment” movies. They are the most political films there are because they dismiss the possibility of change. In every frame they tell you everything’s fine the way it is. They are a continual advertisement for things as they are.
Phoumi Vongvichit: This glorious victory of the Lao people, like that of the Vietnamese people in the resistance against the French colonialists and American interventionists, have proved that even a small nation can get the better of any imperialists aggressor.
Friedrich Engels: “Das Kapital” is often called, on the Continent, “the Bible of the working class.”
William Z. Foster: Lenin, in fighting for a correct political line, fought on two fronts. That is, he combated both the right danger and all forms of pseudo-leftism. This two-front fight was particularly necessary in the United States with its ingrained historical right weakness of American exceptionalism and its long affliction of 'left' sectarianism.
Fidel Castro: Son of a bitch! (This was Fidel Castro’s reaction in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis to the decision by Nikita Khrushchev, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), to remove medium-range ballistic missiles from Cuba in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade the Isle of Freedom).
Arthur Schopenhauer: Religions are like glow-worms: they need darkness in order to shine. A certain degree of general ignorance is the condition for the existence of any religion.
Gerry Spence: The people of a nation are enslaved when, together, they are helpless to institute effective change, when the people serve the government more than the government serves them.
Salvador Allende: The cycle of intervention, brutality and murder, often masked under the rhetoric of humanitarianism, is how American imperialism has worked since that country's inception.
Amilcar Cabral: Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.
Bob Marley: It takes a revolution, to create a solution.
Jean-Luc Godard: Fifty years after the October Revolution, the American industry rules cinema the world over. There is nothing much to add to this statement of fact. Except that on our own modest level we too should provoke two or three Vietnams in the bosom of the vast Hollywood-Cinecittá-Mosfilm-Pinewood-etc. empire, and, both economically and aesthetically, struggling on two fronts as it were, create cinemas which are national, free, brotherly, comradely and bonded in friendship.
Jean-Luc Godard: Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents.
Cecil Rhodes: I was in the East End of London (a working-class quarter) yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for 'bread! bread!' and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism.... My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.
Nelson Mandela: Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice. Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.
Louis XVI: You want to erase over a millennium of our history, destroying our constitutional politics and rebuilding a new one from the ashes.
Mao Zedong: An army without culture is a dull-witted army, and a dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.
Karl Marx: Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.
Frank Church: The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.
Lenin: The role of a newspaper, however, is not limited solely to the dissemination of ideas, to political education, and to the enlistment of political allies. A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.
Eugene V. Debs: Solidarity is the last and only hope of labor.
Friedrich Engels: We by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people – we belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to correctly learn and apply its laws.
General Baker, Jr.: Our task is to make thinkers out of fighters and fighters out of thinkers.
Fred Hampton: First of all, we say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx, and Lenin, and Che Guevara end Mao Tse-Tung and anybody else that has ever said or knew or practiced anything about revolution, always said that revolution is a class struggle. It was one class—the oppressed—those other class—the oppressor. And it’s got to be a universal fact. Those that don’t admit to that are those that don’t want to get involved in a revolution, because they know that as long as they’re dealing with a race thing, they’ll never be involved in a revolution. They can talk about numbers; they can hang you up in many, many ways, but as soon as you start talking about class, then you got to start talking about some guns. And that’s what the Party had to do.
Ho Chi Minh: The third enemy is individualism, the petty-bourgeois mentality which still lurks in each of us. It is waiting for an opportunity - either failure or success - to rear its head.
Richard Irving Dodge: Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.
Joseph Joubert: The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.
George Carlin: War is rich old men protecting their property by sending middle class and lower class men off to die. It always has been.
Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya: To build socialism means not only building gigantic factories and flour mills. This is essential but not enough for building socialism. People must grow in mind and heart. And on the basis of this individual growth of each in our conditions a new type of mighty socialist collective will in the long run be formed, where 'I' and 'we' will merge into one inseparable whole. Such a collective can only develop on the basis of profound ideological solidarity and an equally profound emotional rapprochement, mutual understanding.
Klaus Schwab: What we are very proud of, is that we penetrate the global cabinets of countries with our WEF Young Global Leaders.
Liz Truss: The cut and thrust of a free press, even if some people find it offensive, is a vital part of a free country. I would die in a ditch for it.
Dmitrii Moor: Confession was not invented for nothing. It is through your confession that your every thought will reach the ears of the district policeman.
James Connolly: Monarchy is a survival of the tyranny imposed by the hand of greed and treachery upon the human race in the darkest and most ignorant days of our history.
Karl Marx: It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things – but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces – but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty – but for the worker, deformity.
Cecil Rhodes: To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible, and promote the best interests of humanity.
Cecil Rhodes: In order to save the forty million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, our colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population of this country, to provide new markets. ... The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question.
Cecil Rhodes: I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.
Cecil Rhodes: The world is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered and colonised.
V.J. Jerome: This struggle on two fronts is the purifying force which Lenin revitalized in forging world Bolshevism; it is the war of extermination which Stalin has relentlessly waged and taught every Communist Party to wage against the Right and 'Left' deviators from Marxism-Leninism and against all conciliators to opportunism.
Carl Sagan: I don’t want to believe. I want to know.
Rosa Luxemburg: We prefer the most expensive republic to the cheapest monarchy; this is not a matter of money: the monarchy is the most backward tool of class rule.
Voltaire: Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value: zero.
Charles Bukowski: They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work.
Malcolm X: A new world is in the making, and it is up to us to prepare ourselves so that we may take our rightful place in it.
Joseph Goebbels: It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.
Harry Patch: War is organized murder and nothing else.
Lenin: Soviet, or socialist, democracy sweeps aside the pompous, bullying, words, declares ruthless war on the hypocrisy of the "democrats", the landlords, capitalists or well-fed peasants who are making money by selling their surplus bread to hungry workers at profiteering prices.
Karl Marx: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
Karl Marx: The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general.
Ayn Rand: It is true that the welfare-statists are not socialists, that they never advocated or intended the socialization of private property, that they want to 'preserve' private property-with government control of its use and disposal. But that is the fundamental characteristic of fascism.
Thomas Mann: To place Russian communism on the same moral level with Nazi fascism, because both are totalitarian, is, at best, superficial, in the worse case it is fascism. He who insists on this equality may be a democrat; in truth and in his heart, he is already a fascist, and will surely fight fascism with insincerity and appearance, but with complete hatred only communism.
Umberto Eco: Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and point the finger at any of its new instances - every day and in every part of the world.
Jonah Goldberg: Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore defined as the enemy.
Roger Griffin: (Fascism is) a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led "armed party" which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation's imminent rebirth from decadence.
Aldous Huxley: Of course, I am against fascism with its spread of color prejudice and race hatred and working class oppression. How could any sensible Negro be otherwise?
George L. Jackson: The fascist arrangement has attempted to create the illusion of a mass society in which the traditional capitalist ruling class would continue to play its leading role.
George L. Jackson: The essence of a U.S.A. totalitarian socio-political capitalism is concealed behind the illusion of a mass participatory society. We must rip away its mask. Then the debate can end, and we can enter a new phase of struggle based on the development of an armed revolutionary culture that will triumph.
Mark Neocleous: Despite the fact that only the Nazi included into the title of their party designation 'National Socialist', fascism generally presented itself as socialist.
Karl Polanyi: Market society was born in England-yet it was on the Continent that its weaknesses engendered the most tragic complications. In order to comprehend German fascism, we must revert to Ricardian England. The nineteenth century, as cannot be overemphasized, was England's century. The Industrial Revolution was an English event. Market economy, free trade, and the gold standard were English inventions. These institutions broke down in the twenties everywhere-in Germany, Italy, or Austria the event was merely more political and more dramatic. But whatever the scenery and the temperature of the final episodes, the long-run factors which wrecked that civilization should be studied in the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, England.
David Renton: Fascism began as a rejection of the idea that reason could be used to understand society and resulted, Sternhell argues, in the formation of a 'new generation of intellectuals (which) rose violently against the rationalist individuals of liberal society'. These intellectuals absorbed the synthesised socialism and nationalism and thus created a new ideology, 'a socialism without the proletariat', which duly became fascism. This ideology Sternhell describes as being 'a synthesis of organic nationalism and anti-Marxist socialism,...'
Lew Rockwell: Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police State as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive State the unlimited master of society.
Zeev Sternhell: In the form that it emerged at the turn of the century and developed in the 1920s and 1930s, the fascist ideology represented a synthesis of organic nationalism with the antimaterialist revision of Marxism.
Zeev Sternhell: (Fascist ideology was) a variety of socialism which, while rejecting Marxism, remained revolutionary. This form of socialism was also, by definition, anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois, and its opposition to historical materialism made it the natural ally of radical nationalism.
Zeev Sternhell: If the Fascist ideology cannot be described as a simple response to Marxism, its origins, on the other hand, were the direct result of very specific revision of Marxism. It was a revision of Marxism and not a variety of Marxism or a consequence of Marxism...It was the French and Italian Sorelians, the theoreticians of revolutionary syndicalism who made this new and original revision of Marxism, and precisely this was their contribution to the birth of the Fascist ideology.
J.L. Talmon: Fascism presented itself not only as an alternative, but also as the heir to socialism.
Frank Zappa: The biggest threat to America today is not communism. It's moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that's happened during the Reagan administration is steering us right down that pipe.
Kim Il Sung: Our Party’s Juche idea is a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary belief which has been evolved during the long years of revolutionary struggle. The Juche idea requires that one should consider and judge all problems arising in the revolution and construction; using one’s own intelligence and solve them by one’s own efforts and that everything should be subordinated to the interests of the revolution and of the people in one’s own country.
Stalin: The proletarian struggle is not, however, an uninterrupted advance, an unbroken chain of victories. The proletarian struggle also has its trials, its defeats. The genuine revolutionary is not one who displays courage in the period of a victorious uprising but one who, while fighting well during the victorious advance of the revolution, also displays courage when the revolution is in retreat, when the proletariat suffers defeat who does not lose his head and does not funk when the revolution suffers reverses, when the enemy achieves success; who does not become panic-stricken or give way to despair when the revolution is in a period of retreat.
Joe Biden: And this is a nation that rejects violence as a political tool. We do not encourage violence.
Bertolt Brecht: The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don't understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it.
Gramsci: The popular masses who want peace, freedom and bread must, in this period of dark onrush of events, always hold themselves ready to spring up as one man against every danger of new carnage and suffering threatened by the so heroic exploits of fascism.
Mao Zedong: In war there must be sacrifice. Without sacrifices there will be no victory. To sacrifice my son or other people's sons are just the same. There are no parents in the world who do not treasure their children. But please do not feel sad on my behalf, because this is something entirely unpredictable.
Ho Chi Minh: Our resistance will be long and painful, but whatever the sacrifices, however long the struggle, we shall fight to the end, until Vietnam is fully independent and reunified.
Henry George: In a capitalist democracy, the tendency is always to give power to the worst. Honesty & patriotism are a handicap, while dishonesty brings success. The best sink to the bottom, the worst float to the top. The vile are ousted only by the viler.
Julius Caesar: If you must break the law, do it to seize power; in all other cases observe it.
Napoleon Bonaparte: In politics, never retreat, never retract and never admit a mistake.
Ho Chi Minh: In all countries, the Trotskyists give themselves fine names in order to mask their dirty work and banditry. For example: in Spain they call themselves the United Marxist Workers Party (POUM). Do you know that it's they who constitute the nests of spies in Madrid in Barcelona and in other places in the service of Franco?
Lenin: It is natural for a liberal to speak of "democracy" in general; but a Marxist will never forget to ask: "for what class?"
Mikhail Gorbachev: Then Yeltsin broke up the USSR and at that time I was not in the Kremlin, all the newspaper reporters asked me whether I shall cry? I did not cry, because I really managed to destroy Communism in the USSR, and also in all other European Socialist countries. I did not cry, because I knew that I fulfilled my main aim, that was the defeat of communism in Europe.
Napoleon Bonaparte: God is on the side with the best artillery.
Lenin: An ever subtler falsification of Marxism, an ever subtler presentation of anti-materialist doctrines under the guise of Marxism-this is the characteristic feature of modern revisionism in political economy, in questions of tactics and in philosophy generally, both in epistemology and in sociology.
Lenin: For different nations to live together in peace and freedom or to separate and form different states (if that is more convenient for them), a full democracy, upheld by the working class, is essential. No privileges for any nation or any one language! Not even the slightest degree of oppression or the slightest injustice in respect of a national minority—such are the principles of working-class democracy.
B.K. Gebert: Communists declare that social-democracy, in its ideology & practice, paves the way for fascism; that it splits the working class, and so weakens the struggle of the proletariat against fascism.
Milan Kundera: The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Andrei Zhdanov: We Bolsheviks do not deny our cultural heritage. On the contrary, we subject to a critical study the cultural heritage of all peoples and all ages in order to draw from it all that can inspire the working people of Soviet society to great achievements.
Kwame Ture: Socialism hasn't gone anywhere. It has been betrayed, yes. But betrayal doesn't mean collapse. Perhaps they get confused because, at least Judas had the dignity after betraying Christianity to hang himself! Gorbachev is still running around the world picking up pieces of silver.
Friedrich Engels: Socialism hasn't gone anywhere. It has been betrayed, yes. But betrayal doesn't mean collapse. Perhaps they get confused because, at least Judas had the dignity after betraying Christianity to hang himself! Gorbachev is still running around the world picking up pieces of silver.
William Z. Foster: Capitalism will not grow into Socialism. The great masses of toilers must be in a revolutionary mood ... they must smash capitalism. This all means that they must be under the general leadership of the only revolutionary party, the Communist party.
Mikhail Gorbachev: My ambition was to liquidate communism, the dictatorship over all the people. Supporting me and urging me on in this mission was my wife, who was of this opinion long before I was. I knew that I could only do this if I was the leading functionary. In this my wife urged me to climb to the top post.
Mikhail Gorbachev: I decided that I must destroy the whole apparatus of the CPSU and the USSR. Also, I must do this in all of the other socialist countries. My ideal is the path of social democracy.
Mikhail Gorbachev: I found friends that had the same thoughts as I in Yakovlev and Shevernadze, they all deserve to be thanked for the break-up of the USSR and the defeat of Communism.
Mikhail Gorbachev: I wanted to save the USSR, but only under social democracy rule. This I could not do. Yeltsin wanted power, he did not know anything about democracy or what I intended to do.