Post your favorite quotes here.

[Skyhilist]

Pretty simple concept. Post your favorite quotes here. If you find more quotes that you like after posting, simply edit your original post (or add a new one if you really want to).

I'll start:


"You know what they want? Obedient workers * people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it." --George Carlin


"I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying." --Andy Dufresne

"Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies." --Andy Dufresne

"Capitalism, organized around a ‘grow-or-die’ market system based on rivalry and expansion, must tear down the natural world - turning soil into sand, polluting the atmosphere, changing the entire climatic pattern of the planet, and possibly making the earth unsuitable for complex forms of life. In effect, it is proving to be an ecological cancer and may well simplify complex ecosystems that have been in the making for countless aeons." --Murray Bookchin

“Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult." --George Orwell, 1984

"Nationalism is an infantile sickness, it is the measles of the human race." --Albert Einstein

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." —Albert Einstein

"I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man." --Che Guevara

"When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion." --Robert Pirsig

"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals." --Albert Einstein

"The flag? Does it wave over a country where you are free and have a home, or does it rather symbolize a country that meets you with clenched fists when you strike for better wages and shorter hours? Will you fight for your masters' religion which teaches you to obey them even when they tell you to kill one another?" --Helen Keller

"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others." --Mikhail Bakunin

"All is for all!" --Peter Kropotkin

"You can't have capitalism without racism." --Malcolm X

"The means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective property of the race. Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all. All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate every one's part in the production of the world's wealth." --Peter Kropotkin

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." --Noam Chomsky

"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media." --Noam Chomsky

"Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains." --Karl Marx

"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." --Karl Marx

“The notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man” --Murray Bookchin

"I am an anarchist not because I believe anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal." --Rudolf Rocker

"Black storms shake the sky
Black clouds blind us
Although death and pain await us
Against the enemy we must go
The most precious good
is freedom
And we have to defend it
With courage and faith
Raise the revolutionary flag
Moving us forward with unstoppable triumph
Working people march onwards to the battle
We have to smash the reaction
To the Barricades
To the Barricades
For the triumph
of the Confederation"
--A Las Barricadas

"Non-violent civil disobedience only works when your oppressor has a conscience." --Nelson Mandela

"If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words — our lives — our pains — nothing! The taking of our lives — lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler — all! That last moment belongs to us — that agony is our triumph." --Bartolomeo Vanzetti

[Creative Destruction]

"I support guerilla tactics in parliament the same way I do in any other respect. I favor them in local elections and local government bodies. They've proved successful there. And I see no reason why -- with a few TDs and a few MPs of the right calibre, pursuing the right policies -- why we can't destroy the confidence of the people in these institutions and bring them tumbling down in ruin."
--Seamus Costello

"You might run a liberator like Eldridge Cleaver out of the country, but you can’t run liberation out of the country. You might murder a freedom fighter like Bobby Hutton, but you can’t murder freedom fighting, and if you do, you’ll come up with answers that don’t answer, explanations that don’t explain, you’ll come up with conclusions that don’t conclude, and you’ll come up with people that you thought should be acting like pigs that’s acting like people and moving on pigs."
--Fred Hampton

"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality."
--Che

"The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this 'defeat' into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this 'defeat'.

'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!"
--Rosa Luxemburg

"It’s all about money, not freedom, y'all, okay? Nothing to do with fuckin’ freedom. If you think you’re free, try going somewhere without fucking money, okay?"
--Bill Hicks

"Bosses! You know what I always use to get from my boss... "Hick's how come you're not working?" I'd go there's nothing to do and he'd go "Well you pretend like your working son!" and I'd go why don't you pretend I'm working... You get paid more than me, you fantasize. Shit, pretend I'm mopping... I'll pretend they're buying shit and we can close up... Hey, I'm the boss now your fired! How's that for a fantasy sir?"
--Bill Hicks

"The rain falls upon the just
And also on the unjust fellas
But mostly it falls upon the just
Cause the unjust have the just's umbrellas"
--Cormac McCarthy

[argeiphontes]

Awesome idea for a thread! I've been copying quotes into my quotes file since I joined up... Not all of these are strictly leftist, but they're fun.

"Things are going to get unimaginably worse, and they are never, ever, going to get better again!"
-- Kurt Vonnegut, in a commencement address

"Those stock market guys are crooked."
-- Al Capone

"Theory without Practice is empty; Practice without Theory is blind."
-- Immanuel Kant.

"In theory there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is."
-- Yogi Berra (attrib.)

"The very employers and politicians and publishers who talk most loudly of class antagonism and the destruction of the American system now undermine that system by this attempt to coerce the votes of the wage earners of this country. It is the 1936 version of the old threat to close down the factory or the office if a particular candidate does not win. It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them."
-- FDR

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
-- John Steinbeck

"One of Stalinisms greatest crimes was to make Marxism stink in the noses of those who could benefit from it."
-- Terry Eagleton

"But a choice of masters is not freedom."
-- Richard Stallman (aka RMS)

"Be compassionate, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."
-- Zeno of Athens

"The most deadly criticism one could make of modern civilization is that apart from its man-made crises and catastrophes, is not humanly interesting. . . . In the end, such a civilization can produce only a mass man: incapable of spontaneous, self-directed activities: at best patient, docile, disciplined to monotonous work to an almost pathetic degree. . . . Ultimately such a society produces only two groups of men: the conditioners and the conditioned, the active and passive barbarians."
-- Lewis Mumford, 1951

"For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."
-- H. L. Mencken (see also Wlad Turski)

"As the man said, for every complex problem there's a simple solution, and it's wrong." -- Umberto Eco

"For the son of Cronos has ordained this law for men, that fishes and beasts and winged fowls should devour one another, for Justice is not with them; but to mankind he gave Justice, which proves [280] far the best. "
--- Hesiod, Works and Days

"As we do sacrifice to the Phoebus whom Pythagoras worships, never eating aught which has the breath of life."
-- Innesimachus, qtd. in Diogenes Laertius, Life of Pythagoras, XX "Poetic Testimonies"

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum"
-- Noam Chomsky

And finally, probably my favorite,

"This is my test of character. There you have the despotic instinct of men. They do not like the cat because the cat is free, and will never consent to become a slave. He will do nothing to your order, as the other animals do."
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

[Remus Bleys]

"Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions."
~ GK Chesterton.

Now, I'm probably intolerant of different things than this man for different reasons, but the quote stands nicely still.

[Brutus]

'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 revolution's 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
---
"One must not allow oneself to be misled by the cry for “unity.” Those who have this word most often on their lips are those who sow the most dissension, just as at present the Jura Bakuninists in Switzerland, who have provoked all the splits, scream for nothing so much as for unity. Those unity fanatics are either the people of limited intelligence who want to stir everything up together into one nondescript brew, which, the moment it is left to settle, throws up the differences again in much more acute opposition because they are now all together in one pot (you have a fine example of this in Germany with the people who preach the reconciliation of the workers and the petty bourgeoisie)--or else they are people who consciously or unconsciously (like Mühlberger , for instance) want to adulterate the movement. For this reason the greatest sectarians and the biggest brawlers and rogues are at certain moments the loudest shouters for unity. Nobody in our lifetime has given us more trouble and been more treacherous than the unity shouters."
- Engels
---

“Our primary goal must be to remove bourgeois society from the face of the earth. There’s no divergence of opinion on that point. He who acknowledges another tactic than the one I pointed out, must leave the party.”
August Bebel
---

Trotsky quotes:
Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service.
----
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.
----

*In the Ninth Party Congress he argued for "such a regime under which each worker feels himself to be a soldier of labor who cannot freely dispose of himself; if he is ordered transferred, he must execute that order; if he does not do so, he will be a deserter who should be punished. Who will execute this? The trade union. It will create a new regime. That is the militarization of the working class."
----
"We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy."
Marx and Engels The Communist Manifesto Chapter two

"The proletariat too needs democratic forms for the seizure of political power but they are for it, like all political forms, mere means. But if today democracy is wanted as an end it is necessary to rely on the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie, that is, on classes that are in process of dissolution and reactionary in relation to the proletariat when they try to maintain themselves artificially. Furthermore it must not be forgotten that it is precisely the democratic republic which is the logical form of bourgeois rule; a form however that has become too dangerous only because of the level of development the proletariat has already reached; but France and America show that it is still possible as purely bourgeois rule."
Friedrich Engels to Eduard Bernstein In Zurich 24 March 1884 (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975).

"But in England, where the industrial and agricultural working class forms the immense majority of the people, democracy means the dominion of the working class, neither more nor less. Let, then, that working class prepare itself for the task in store for it, -- the ruling of this great empire; let them understand the responsibilities which inevitably will fall to their share. And the best way to do this is to use the power already in their hands, the actual majority they possess in every large town in the kingdom, to send to Parliament men of their own order"

"Moreover, in England a real democratic party is impossible unless it be a working men's party."

Articles by Engels in the Labour Standard 1881 A Working Men's Party No. 12, July 23, 1881,

"The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists."
"The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament."
Lenin The State and Revolution (1917)

"A nationalized planned economy needs democracy, as the human body needs oxygen."
Leon Trotsky in a statement of 1936, as quoted in The Informed Vision : Essays On Learning And Human Nature (2002) by David Hawkins, p. 25; sometimes paraphrased "Socialism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen."

Engels: “As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a ‘free people’s state’; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist ....
----
James Connolly quotes:

"If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs."
----

"Yes, friends, governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class."
----

"Under a socialist system every nation will be the supreme arbiter of its own destinies, national and international; will be forced into no alliance against its will, but will have its independence guaranteed and its freedom respected by the enlightened self-interest of the socialist democracy of the world."
----

"Though I have usually posed as a Catholic, I have not done my duty for 15 years, and have not the slightest tincture of faith left…"
-------------
Denis Diderot*
*“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest”


*“Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole,” Marx*

“Protest is when I say I don’t like this and that. Resistance is when I see to it that things that I don’t like no longer occur. Protest is when I say I will no longer go along with it. Resistance is when I see to it that no one else goes along with it anymore either.”
Ulrike meinhof

*"A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strengh—life itself is will to power."
Nietzsche*

"First off, the authoritarian-libertarian dichotomy is a false one; secondly, as Marxists, what should matter to us is not whether something was 'authoritarian' or 'libertarian' but whether or not it is advancing proletarian class interests."
9mm

[Brutus]

"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*
-----
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
---
*"A first-class bourgeois manipulator, an astute politician, a popular orator who will deliver any speeches you like even r-r-revolutionary ones, to a labour audience, and a man who is capable of obtaining sizable sops for docile workers in the shape of social reforms (insurance, etc.), Lloyd George serves the bourgeoisie splendidly, and serves it precisely among the workers, brings its influence precisely to the proletariat, to where the bourgeoisie needs it most and where it finds it most difficult to*subject the masses morally."

----
" The abolition of classes means placing all citizens on an equal footing with regard to the means of production belonging to society as a whole. It means giving all citizens equal opportunities of working on the publicly-owned means of production, on the publicly-owned land, at the publicly-owned factories, and so forth.*
*
This explanation of socialism has been necessary to enlighten our learned liberal professor, Mr. Tugan, who may, if he tries hard, now grasp the fact that it is absurd to expect equality of strength and abilities in socialist society.*
*
In brief, when socialists speak of equality they always mean social equality, equality of social status, and not by any means the physical and mental equality of individuals.*
*
The puzzled reader may ask: how could a learned liberal professor have forgotten these elementary axioms familiar to anybody who has read any exposition of the views of socialism? The answer is simple: the personal qualities of * present-day professors are such that we may find among them even exceptionally stupid people like Tugan. But the social status of professors in bourgeois society is such that only those are allowed to hold such posts who sell science to serve the interests of capital, and agree to utter the most fatuous nonsense, the most unscrupulous drivel and twaddle against the socialists. The bourgeoisie will forgive the professors all this as long as they go on “abolishing” socialism. "

[Brutus]

Interview of Marx
“Well, then, to carry out the principles of socialism do its believers advocate assassination and bloodshed?”

“No great movement,” Karl answered, “has ever been inaugurated Without Bloodshed.

“The independence of America was won by bloodshed, Napoleon captured France through a bloody process, and he was overthrown by the same means. Italy, England, Germany, and every other country gives proof of this, and as for assassination,” he went on to say, “it is not a new thing, I need scarcely say. Orsini tried to kill Napoleon; kings have killed more than anybody else; the Jesuits have killed; the Puritans killed at the time of Cromwell. These deeds were all done or attempted before socialism was born. Every attempt, however, now made upon a royal or state individual is attributed to socialism. The socialists would regret very much the death of the German Emperor at the present time. He is very useful where he is; and Bismarck has done more for the cause than any other statesman, by driving things to extremes.”
(Source - http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...x/79_01_05.htm)*

*"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)"

March 1850 address of the Central Committee to the Communist League:

Here the proletariat must take care... that workers’ candidates are nominated everywhere in opposition to bourgeois-democratic candidates... Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.

----

“Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat"

[Brutus]

"Very closely connected with this are our tactics in the Reichstag itself. That which always so facilitates our deputies’ lustrous campaigns and outstanding role is – and we must be completely aware of this – the absence in the German Reichstag of any bourgeois democracy and opposition worthy of the name. Social Democracy has an easy time of it vis-à-vis the reactionary majority, since the party is the sole consistent and reliable advocate of the interests of the people’s prosperity and of progress in all areas of public life.

This same unique situation, however, give rise to the difficult task for the Social-Democratic parliamentary party of appearing not merely as the representative of an oppositional party, but also as the representative of a revolutionary class. In other words, the task that arises is not merely to criticize the policy of the ruling classes from the standpoint of the people’s present interests, that is, from the standpoint of the existing society itself, but also to contrast existing society as its every move with the socialist ideal of society, a ideal which goes beyond the most progressive bourgeois policy. And if the people can convince themselves at each Reichstag debate of how much more intelligently, more progressively, economically more advantageously the conditions in the present State would be arranged if the wishes and proposal of Social Democracy were met each time, then the Reichstag debates should now convince them more then ever how necessary it is to overthrow the whole order in order to realize socialism.

[...]

The more the fresh and bold agitation of Social Democracy resound in the Reichstag in extreme dissonance to the trivial-insipid tone and the dull, business-like mediocrity of all the bourgeois parties, advocating not only its minimal programme but also its ultimate socialist goal, then the more will be the great masses’ respect for the Reichstag increase. And the more secure will be the guarantee that the masses of the people will not stand idly by and allow the reaction to snatch this tribune and the universal suffrage from them."

Rosa Luxemburg

[GiantMonkeyMan]

Ah, goddamit, it's time to put an end to this. We've moaned and suffered long enough. No half-way war. No more cowardly pity. Death to the bourgeoisie! - Sébastien Faure

Aristotle's mind was so completely dominated by his economic environment that he was unable to conceive of a world in which there would be no chattel slaves, and so declared that slaves must always exist. A prophecy now falsified for hundreds of years. - James Connolly

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. - Martin Luther King, Jr

Under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights. - Albert Einstein

Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and bruised itself. We have been enjoined by the courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, traduced by the press, frowned upon in public opinion, and deceived by politicians. 'But notwithstanding all this and all these, labor is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun. - Eugene V. Debs

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society private property is already done away for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its nonexistence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the nonexistence of property for the immense majority of society. - Karl Marx

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

There is no “equality before the law” possible but between men economically free. Men are today economically the subject of the capitalist. “Equality before the law” is, under such circumstances, a hollow mockery. - Daniel De Leon

The capitalist economic order is a system of unorganised elementally developing, and as a whole irrational, economic life ("anarchy of production," competition, crises, etc.). The Socialist economic order is a system of organised, planned, and anti-exploiter economy, in which little by little there disappears the division between town and country, intellectual and physical labour. - Bukharin

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground. - Frederick Douglass

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

"Pure democracy” is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers. History knows of bourgeois democracy which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian democracy which takes the place of bourgeois democracy. - Lenin

A slaveholder who, through cunning and violence shackles his slaves in chains - and a slave who, through cunning and violence, breaks the chains - let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality! - Leon Trotsky

There’s no one but us to witness our own annihilation, as if it were just a simple change of scenery, to get indignant about the latest progress of the disaster, to patiently compile its encyclopedia. - The Coming Insurrection

Marx never promised victories for the revolutions at any definite date of the calendar. All that he forecast was that there was going to be a struggle, a heavy, at times a bloody struggle, between classes and peoples, a struggle that would go on for generations and which should – if civilization did not in the meantime collapse into barbarity – lead to the dissolution of capitalism and the emergence of socialism. - Isaac Deutscher

Marx's goal is leisure, not labor. The best reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you happen to dislike, is that you detest having to work. Marx thought that capitalism had developed the forces of production to the point at which, under different social relations, they could be used to emancipate the majority of men and women from the most degrading forms of labor. - Terry Eagleton

Marx achieved what the classical economists could not, namely an explanation of capital’s growing difficulties by the contradiction, specific to capitalism, between exchange-value and use-value production. In this way he succeeded showing that the limits of capital are set by capital itself. And since the economic categories mask real class relations, the economic contradictions characteristic of capitalism are at the same time real antagonisms of interest, which can therefore be abolished by revolution. - Paul Mattick

The ideas of Marxism, which create revolutionary parties, are stronger than the parties they create, and never fail to survive their downfall. - James P. Cannon

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. - Marx

[ChrisK]

Why is this in philosophy?

[Stalinist Speaker]

"When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use."

Joseph Stalin
:laugh::laugh::laugh:

[Bea Arthur]

"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord John Dalberg-Acton

[Skyhilist]

"Why is this in philosophy?" --ChristoferKoch

[A.J.]

"All for one and one for all" - Dogtanian in Dogtanian and the Three Muskahounds(late 80s cartoon)

"Keeping the British end up...." Roger Moore's James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me

[Lenin1986]

"Today I didn't even have to use my A.K.
I got to say it was a good day" - Ice Cube

[Rugged Collectivist]

My sig

[Os Cangaceiros]

"Life sucks and then you die."

- my mother

[Creative Destruction]

"Listen to me, you hicks! I'm not the only one here! They'll fool you, just like they fooled me a thousand times! But it's time I fool somebody. It's time I fool them! Them big city, striped pants, lickspittle hick haters! I'm running for governor on my own! I'm comin' for them and I'm comin' for blood!

First thing I'm gonna do is build a big road across these swamps and alligators and anything else that gets in my way. Thousands of miles of concrete if that's what it takes, so I can come out here and visit with my fellow hicks on a regular basis.

Then I'm gonna build me a bridge across that mighty Mississippi and name it after myself cause I'm the one who built it. Then I'm gonna build y'all a new school, send ya kids home with free pencils and tablets and books to study and learn on the way to the new university that I'm gonna build where every one of them can go, same as rich folks kids.

Now, I hope you listenin', you hicks. Cause I don't wanna drive all the back home, just to drive all the way back here again, just to tell you: this is it. If you don't vote, you don't matter. And then you just as ignorant as them in the city say you are while they stealin the food off your table and every nickle out of your pocket without sayin' thank you please. Cause then you are just a bunch of ignorant hicks who ain't got nothin' because you deserve nothin'.

So listen to me. Listen here. Lift your eyes, and look onto God's blessed and un-flyblown truth that you are a hick. And ain't nobody ever help a hick but a hick himself. It's up to you, to nail these parasites up! Up to you and me and God!

Nail up Joe Harrison! Nail up McMurphy! And nail up anyone who gets between you and the roads and the bridges and the schools and the food you need. You give me the hammer, and I'll do it! I'll nail they hides to a barn door! Nail 'em up!"

--Willie Stark, from All The King's Men.

[Red_Banner]

"Philosophers have only tried to explain the World; the important thing is to change it!"-Rough translation of a Marx quote.

[cyu]

http://www.revleft.com/vb/great-quotes-words-t84668/index.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/great-quotes-words-t84668/index.html?p=1331948

[Creative Destruction]

"You ask me why the IWW is not patriotic to the United States. If you were a bum without a blanket; if you had left your wife and kids when you went west for a job, and had never located them since; if your job had never kept you long enough in a place to qualify to vote; if you slept in a lousy, sour bunkhouse, and ate food just as rotten as they could give you and get by with it; if deputy sheriffs shot your cooking cans full of holes and spilled your grub on the ground; if your wages were lowered on you when the bosses thought they had you down...if every person who represented law and order and the nation beat you up, railroaded you to jail, and the good Christian people cheered and told them to go to it, how in hell do you expect a man to be patriotic? This war is a businessman's war and we don't see why we should go out and get shot in order to save the lovely state of affairs that we now enjoy." —William Dudley "Big Bill" Haywood

[Red_Banner]

"When I get down on my knees, it is not to pray."-Madonna

"So just fight bravely on, most gracious masters of capital! We need you for the present; here and there we even need you as rulers. You have to clear the vestiges of the Middle Ages and of absolute monarchy out of our path; you have to annihilate patriarchalism; you have to carry out centralisation; you have to convert the more or less propertyless classes into genuine proletarians, into recruits for us; by your factories and your commercial relationships you must create for us the basis of the material means which the proletariat needs for the attainment of freedom. In recompense whereof you shall be allowed to rule for a short time. You shall be allowed to dictate your laws, to bask in the rays of the majesty you have created, to spread your banquets in the halls of kings, and to take the beautiful princess to wife — but do not forget that

“The hangman stands at the door! “"-Friedrich Engels

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."-Albert Einstein


"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."-Thomas Paine

"East, West, just points of the compass, each as stupid as the other."-Dr.No

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful"-?

[Hrafn]

"Slåss! Riv sönder den kapitalistiska ordningen i världen, om det nu är en ordning - det är kaos. Är vi skyldiga att följa deras paroller? Nej! Vi gör uppror!"

Anton Nilson, "the Amalthea Man", 1984.

Roughly and poorly translated, it should be about "Fight! Tear apart the capitalist order in the world, if it now is a order - it is chaos. Do we owe to follow their slogans? No! We rebel!" or so.

[Art Vandelay]

Hunter S. Thompson, when told by his editor/accountant that he needed to return the Cadillac/'the red shark' that he drove during his trip to vegas, which fear and loathing is based on:

"Well I can't cover the god damn American dream in a Volksewagen! What the fuck is wrong with you?"

:lol:

[Petrol Bomb]

"Don't you know there ain't no Devil, it's just God when he's drunk." - Tom Waits

[Venas Abiertas]

Marx condensed:

"If one man has a dollar he didn't work for, some other man worked for a dollar he didn't get."

Big Bill Haywood

[freecommunist]

I am not a Marxist. Karl Marx

[boiler]

"They could lock up my body but not my spirit; that was with the people" - Huey P. Newton

“The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people” - Huey P. Newton

"For us defeatism is a crime and to strive for victory in the War of Resistance is an inescapable duty. For only by fighting in defense of the motherland can we defaet the aggressors and achieve national liberation. And only by achieving national liberation will it be possible for the proletariat and other working people to achieve their own emancipation. The victory of China and the defeat of the invading imperialist will help the people of other countries." - Chairman Mao

[Hit The North]

"Why the fuck is this thread in the Philosophy forum? Don't we have a moderator any more?" - Me.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

"I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world. "

- Eugene V. Debs.

[Rugged Collectivist]

"Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved..., had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment."

-John Brown

[ComradeLeninist]

My Favorite quotes of Lenin:
"One man with a gun can control 100 without one"
"Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot."
"When there is state there can be no freedom, but when there is freedom there will be no state."
"A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution""
"If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years."
"A lie told often enough becomes the truth."
"Politics begin where the masses are, not where there are thousands, but where there are millions, that is where serious politics begin."
"Sometimes - history needs a push."

-Vladimir Lenin

[Celtic_0ne]

"When I get down on my knees, it is not to pray."-Madonna

"So just fight bravely on, most gracious masters of capital! We need you for the present; here and there we even need you as rulers. You have to clear the vestiges of the Middle Ages and of absolute monarchy out of our path; you have to annihilate patriarchalism; you have to carry out centralisation; you have to convert the more or less propertyless classes into genuine proletarians, into recruits for us; by your factories and your commercial relationships you must create for us the basis of the material means which the proletariat needs for the attainment of freedom. In recompense whereof you shall be allowed to rule for a short time. You shall be allowed to dictate your laws, to bask in the rays of the majesty you have created, to spread your banquets in the halls of kings, and to take the beautiful princess to wife — but do not forget that

“The hangman stands at the door! “"-Friedrich Engels

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."-Albert Einstein


"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."-Thomas Paine

"East, West, just points of the compass, each as stupid as the other."-Dr.No

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful"-?
I believe that last one is Seneca

[Kurdish-PKK-Communist]

"I will win this war, even in my grave"

-Abdulla Ocalan (Founder of the Kurdistan's Workers Party)

[RevolucionarBG]

"When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use."

Joseph Stalin
:laugh::laugh::laugh:

Mine too...

And this one: "Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy." - Mao Tse Tung

[Bala Perdida]

"This shit's got to go!"
-Jacque Fresco

[Bala Perdida]

"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People's Stick!"

-Mikhail Bakunin

[skitty]

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.-Mencken

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."-Galbraith

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”-Keynes

[RedBen]

"you are literally like a rocketship full of hitlers crashing into a building made of hitlers, that are in fact, made out of hitlers" - Some person on facebook
:laugh::laugh::laugh:

[RedSunrise]

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
― Harlan Ellison

[TheSocialistMetalhead]

*“Those who reject Christianity will not be moved by Christ’s statement that poverty is blessed. But here a rather remarkable fact comes to my aid. Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere ‘opiate of the people’ have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor. They regard the poor as the only people worth preserving from ‘liquidation’, and place in them the only hope for the human race. But this is not compatible with a belief that the effects of poverty on those who suffer it are wholly evil; it even implies that they are good. The Marxist thus finds himself in real agreement with the Christian in those two beliefs which Christianity paradoxically demands – that poverty is blessed and yet ought to be removed.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

The quote's ridiculous but proves that a lot of people who reject marxism do so, simply because they don't understand it.

*“History is no longer as it was for the Greeks, an anamnesis, a remembrance. It is rather a thrust into the future.”
― Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation

*In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their own powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who someday will come and accomplish his mission.
-Leon Trotsky, Why marxists oppose individual terrorism

Aaaaaaand a classic

* Those who do not move do not notice their chains

-Rosa Luxemburg

Aaaaaaaand another one

*Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party - though they are quite numerous - is no freedom at all.
-Rosa Luxemburg

[stefanbl]

At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.

Ludwig Wittgenstein