Favorite quote by a revolutionary leftist?

[Akshay!]

The title is self-explanatory.

I'll start with a few

1) “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.” - Che Guevara

2) “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”. - Karl Marx

3) “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Senior’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”
- George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia)

4) "The first man who, after enclosing a plot of land, saw fit to say: "This is mine," and found people who were simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, sufferings and horrors mankind would have been spared if someone had torn up the stakes or filled up the moat and cried to his fellows: "Don’t listen to this impostor; you are lost if you forget that the earth belongs to no one, and that its fruits are for all!""
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I'll add more later.

[tuwix]

Proudhon's "Property is theft" is IMHO the most powerful.

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

"At the risk of sounding ridiculous... let me say that a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love."- Dr. Ernesto "Che" Guevara

"Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are, rather, forced upon parliaments from without." - Rudolph Rocker

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

"I know the Appassionata inside out and yet I want to listen to it every day. It is wonderful, ethereal music. On hearing it I proudly, maybe somewhat naively, think: 'See! people are able to produce such marvels!' I’m often unable to listen to music, it gets on my nerves, I would like to pat my fellow men and whisper encouragement for being able to produce such beautiful things in spite of the abominable hell they are living in. However, today one shouldn’t pat anybody - people will only bite your hand off; strike, without pity, although we are against violence in principle. Our task is, in fact, hellishly difficult." - V. I. Lenin

"Behind the old Internationals, the London Bureau of the centrists trails along, happily combining in itself the characteristics of a kindergarten, a school for mentally arrested adolescents, and a home for invalids." - L. D. Trotsky

[Brutus]

Marx:
*"The arming of the whole proletariat with rifles, guns, and ammunition should be carried out at once [and] the workers must ... organize themselves into an independent guard, with their own chiefs and general staff. ... [The aim is] that the bourgeois democratic Government not only immediately loses all backing among the workers, but from the commencement finds itself under the supervision and threats of authorities behind whom stands the entire mass of the working class. ...As soon as the new Government is established they will commence to fight the workers. *In order that this party (i.e., the democrats) whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the first hour of victory, should be frustrated in its nefarious work, it is necessary to organize and arm the proletariat." - Karl Marx, Address to the Communist League (1850)
----
The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.*
Karl Marx
----
"Writing about the factory regime in England during the nineteenth century, Karl Marx noted, "But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its wear-wolf hunger for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight…. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power that can be rendered fluent in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by reducing it of its fertility” (Capital, Chapter 10)"

[Brutus]

The following are all Trotsky:
Trotsky on Stalin, 1924:
The dialectics of history have already hooked him and will raise him up. He is needed by all of them; by the tired radicals, by the bureaucrats, by the Nepmen, the upstarts, by all the worms that are crawling out of the upturned soil of the manured revolution. He knows how to meet them on their own ground, he speaks their language and he knows how to lead them. He has the deserved reputation of an old revolutionist, which makes him invaluable to them as a blinder on the eyes of the country. He has will and daring. He will not hesitate to utilize them and to move them against the Party. Right now he is organising himself around the sneaks of the party, the artful dodgers.
----
In not more than a month’s time terror will assume very violent forms, after the example of the great French Revolution; the guillotine... will be ready for our enemies... that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which makes man shorter by a head.
----

Any intelligent person (or any fool) knows that to save Russia a merciless struggle with anarchy on the left and counter revolution on the right is essential.*
----
We must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life.
----
The life of a revolutionary would be quite impossible without a certain amount of "fatalism."
----
For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.
----

[Brutus]

Lenin:
"Tactics must be based on a sober and strictly objective appraisal of all the class forces in a particular state [...] as well as of the experience of revolutionary movements. It is very easy to show one’s "revolutionary" temper merely by hurling abuse at parliamentary opportunism, or merely by repudiating participation in parliaments [...]. It is far more difficult to create a really revolutionary parliamentary group in a European parliament [...]. [I]n Western Europe, the backward masses of the workers [...] are [...] imbued with bourgeois-democratic and parliamentary prejudices [...], it is only from within such institutions as bourgeois parliaments that Communists can (and must) wage a long and persistent struggle, undaunted by any difficulties, to expose, dispel and overcome these prejudices." (Lenin, 1920)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch07.htm

"For one thing, ours is not actually a workers’ state but a workers’ and peasants’ state. [...] (Bukharin, in the back: “What kind of state? A workers’ and peasants’ state?”) Comrade Bukharin back there may well shout “What kind of state? A workers’ and peasants’ state?” I shall not stop to answer him. Anyone who has a mind to should recall the recent Congress of Soviets, [...]. But that is not all. Our Party Programme—a document which [Bukharin] the author of the ABC of Communism knows very well—shows that ours is a workers’ state with a bureacratic twist to it." (Lenin, 1920)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm
----
We want to achieve a new and better order of society: in this new and better society there must be neither rich nor poor; all will have to work. Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people. This new and better society is called socialist society. The teachings about this society are called socialism.
Lenin*
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When violence is exercised by the working people, by the mass of exploited against the exploiters — then we are for it!
Lenin
---
A United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the European capitalists ... but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe
Lenin

[Brutus]

Assorted:

'From its origin the bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis: capitalists cannot exist without wage workers' - Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
----
A lot of people get the word revolution mixed up and they think revolutions a bad word. Revolution is nothing but like having a sore on your body and then you put something on that sore to cure that infection. I'm telling you that we're living in a sick society. We're involved in a society that produces criminals, thieves and robbers and rapers. Whenever you are in a society like that, that is a sick society.
We're gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we're gonna fight reactionary pigs with international proletarian revolution. That's what it has to be.
We have to understand very clearly that there's a man in our community called a capitalist. Sometimes he's Black and sometimes he's white. But that man has to be driven out of our community because anybody who comes into the community to make profit off of people by exploiting them can be defined as a capitalist.
Fred Hampton*
----
"We aim in the domain of politics at republicanism; in the domain of economics at socialism; in the domain of what is today called religion, at atheism."
August Bebel
---
"The capitalist class rules but does not govern: it contents itself with ruling the government."*
— Karl Kautsky
---

[hatzel]

"The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon's: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity."

...oh no, wait, that wasn't a revolutionary leftist at all, that was famed Nazi Carl Schmitt. Ah well, whatever, it mentioned Proudhon so it's probably close enough :cool:

[Vanguard1917]

'We found that all those "ox-tails," skates fried in fat, and indigestible cakes were not made for Russian stomachs.'
- Krupskaya on British cuisine

[Nevsky]

1) "I have learned that a woman can be a fighter, a freedom fighter, a political activist, and that she can fall in love and be loved. She can be married, have children, be a mother. Revolution must mean life also; every aspect of life."

- Leila Khaled

2) "I have some experience in fighting for socialism, and this experience tells me that if Roosevelt makes a real attempt to satisfy the interests of the proletarian class at the expense of the capitalist class, the latter will put another president in his place. The capitalists will say : Presidents come and presidents go, but we go on forever; if this or that president does not protect our interests, we shall find another. What can the president oppose to the will of the capitalist class?"

- Joseph Stalin

3) "Such terms as “proletarian literature” and “proletarian culture” are dangerous, because they erroneously compress the Culture of the future into the narrow limits of the present day. They falsify perspectives, they violate proportions, they distort standards and they cultivate the arrogance of small circles which is most dangerous."

- Leon Trotsky

4) "[...] they can burn our bodies, they can not destroy our ideas. The ideas are the future for young people, for young people like you. Remember, my son, the happiness of playing ... do not keep it all for you ... Try to understand with humility the next person, help the weak, help those who mourn, help the persecuted, the oppressed: they are your best friends."

- Nicola Sacco

[Fourth Internationalist]

But socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class – that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people. - Rosa Luxemburg

[Dear Leader]

"Political power is a fraud if working people do not take over and retain power in production." - Maurice Brinton

[DDR]

Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy. - Mao Tse-Tung

No freedom to the enemies of freedom - Saint-Just

Marxism comprises many principles, but in the final analysis they can all be brought back to a single sentence: it is right to rebel against the reactionaries. - Mao Tse-Tung

Which democracy? if this is democracy for the working people, if it is liquidating the privileges and social inequalities, then there's none more democratic than us. - José Díaz

[ind_com]

The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history. - Mao Zedong


Ten thousand years are too long, Seize the day, seize the hour! - Mao Zedong

[GiantMonkeyMan]

Middle-class democracy has proved the best camouflage of the political dominance of big capital. - Anton Pannekoek

[Djoko]

I'm against all slogans and quotes, but I like this:

"A revolutionary is a man who reached certain degree of ideopolitical cognition and can't be man anymore without being a revolutionary"
-Vlado Dapčević

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

"I haven't read Marx's Capital, but I have the marks of capital all over my body."

-Big Bill Haywood

[Lenin1986]

"Man's dearest possession is life, and since it is given to him to live but once, he should so live as to have no torturing regrets so that when dying he can say, all my strength was given for the finest cause in the world, the liberation of mankind." Nikolai Ostrovski How the Steel Tempered

[Kalinin's Facial Hair]

"'Order prevails in Berlin!' You foolish lackeys! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will 'rise up again, clashing its weapons', and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!"

Rosa

[Deity]

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people".
-Karl Marx

[La Guaneña]

"Armed workers are not emotional intellectuals, but practical people"

Lenin, State and Revolution

[Jimmie Higgins]

"Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he never will come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again."


when I speak, I don't speak as a Democrat. Or a Republican. Nor an American. I speak as a victim of America's so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy - all we've seen is hypocrisy. When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who has enjoyed the fruits of Americanism. We see America through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism. We don't see any American dream. We've experienced only the American nightmare.

In the Autobiography, Malcolm has a quote that's something like: "They even hate us for liking chicken? Who doesn't like chicken?" -- that and many other of his quotes have always stuck with me. He's probably the best post-war US figure as far as exposing the hypocracy of US liberalism.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

"Sit in the drugstore, look distant, empty, bored, drinking some tasteless coffee? or perhaps BLOW IT UP OR BURN IT DOWN." - Angry Brigade

[cyu]

"When the unjust are in power, the just are guilty." - Me ;)

[Doflamingo]

2 that I've found recently

"When I hear the term Right wing I think of Hitler and Satan and Civil war." - Kurt Cobain

"John Lennon has been my idol all my life but he's dead wrong about revolution... find a representative of gluttony or oppression and blow the motherfuckers head off." - Kurt Cobain

[Lenin1986]

"They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?" Fidel Castro

“I began revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.” Fidel Castro

[Red Nightmare]

"The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe you have to make it fall."- Ernesto "Che" Guevara

"I don't care if I fall, as long as someone else picks my gun up and keeps shooting."- Ernesto Che Guevara

[Fourth Internationalist]

I know it's not by a revolutionary leftist, but...

“My hate is general, I detest all men;

Some because they are wicked and do evil,

Others because they tolerate the wicked,

Refusing them the active vigorous scorn

Which vice should stimulate in virtuous minds."

- Alceste of Molière's Le Misanthrope (1666)

[Ele'ill]

https://1000littlehammers.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/war-has-only-just-begun/


...The sleep of our era is not a good sleep that provides rest. It’s an anxious sleep that leaves you feeling even more worn out, desiring only to go back to sleep again, to escape a little longer this irritating reality. There is a narcosis that begs for an even deeper narcosis. Those who, by luck or misfortune, awake from the prescribed sleep, come into this world as lost children. Where are words, where is the house, where are my ancestors, where are my loves and who are my friends? There are none, my child. Everything has to be built. You must build the language that you will live in. You must build the house where you’ll no longer be alone. You must find the ancestors who will make you more free, and you must invent the new sentimental education through which, once again, you will love. And all of this you must build it upon the general hostility because those who wake up are the nightmare of those who still sleep.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

"They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?" Fidel Castro

“I began revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.” Fidel Castro


Ha! I know where you got those two quotes because I uploaded that video where he says those things!

[tehAdmrl]

"As far as our own desire is concerned, we do not want to fight even for a single day. However, if circumstances force us to fight, we can fight to the finish." - Mao