Great Quotes/Words

[Holden Caulfield]

i posted this is learning rather than chit-chat as i would like it to stay serious, and we can take alot from great words

i'll start, by Malcom X:



I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don’t believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn’t want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I’m not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn’t know how to return the treatment. I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation. I am not a racist. I am against every form of racism and segregation, every form of discrimination. I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color. It is a time for martyrs now, and if I am to be one, it will be for the cause of brotherhood. That's the only thing that can save this country.

[Forward Union]

Sub Marcos



"We were born of the night. We live in it, and we will die in it. But tomorrow there will be light. For those now crying out in the night. For whom day is denied, for whom death is a gift, for whom life is forbidden.

For ourselves Dignity and Rebellion. For ourselves nothing. For everyone Light. For everyone, everything"

[Trystan]

"Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full."- Leon Trotsky

[Forward Union]

"revolutions need organisms to oversee it. There may be anarchist comrades that feel certain ideological misgivings. But the lesson of experience is enough to enduce us to stop pussy footing" - Friends of Durruti "Toward a Fresh Revolution"



[QUOTE]"The gentry must come down, and the poor shall wear the Crown" Gerrard Winstanley 1649

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Max Eastman:


Hegelism is like a mental disease -- you cannot know what it is until you get it, and then you can't know because you have got it.

Bertrand Russell:


Most people would rather die than think -- in fact they do.

and


The worse a man's logic the more interesting is his metaphysics.

Wittgenstein:


Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Marx:


The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

and:


The emancipation of the working class will be an act of the working class.

Trotsky:


Whenever any Marxist attempted to transmute the theory of Marx into a universal master key and ignore all other spheres of learning, Vladimir Ilyich would rebuke him with the expressive phrase 'Komchvanstvo' ('communist swagger').

and:


The organisation of the party substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally the ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committe.

Tony Cliff:


It's not power that corrupts, but lack of power.

[Drace]

It's not power that corrupts, but lack of power.

-Tony Cliff

I love that one.

[Holden Caulfield]

all by Nietzsche:


Is man one of God's blunders? Or is God one of man's blunders?


a great one for the learning forum:


On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.


found on my myspace page:


The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.


for the CC:lol:


There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.

[Pirate turtle the 11th]

-- I hope your doctors black. - Anti-fascist slogan

[Ismail]

"No country whatsoever, big or small, can build socialism by taking credits and aid from the bourgeoisie and the revisionists or by integrating its economy into the world system of capitalist economy. Any such linking of the economy of a socialist country with the economy of bourgeois or revisionist countries opens the doors to the actions of the economic laws of capitalism and the degeneration of the socialist order. This is the road of betrayal and the restoration of capitalism, which the revisionist cliques have pursued and are pursuing." - Enver Hoxha, Report on the Activity of the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania (Tiranë: 8 Nëntori Publishing House, 1977), 8.

"...the health service is free of charge for all and has been extended to the remotest villages. In 1960 we had one doctor per every 3,360 inhabitants, in 1978 we had one doctor per every 687 inhabitants, and this despite the rapid growth of the population. The natural increase of the population in our country is 3.5 times higher than the annual average of European countries, whereas mortality in 978 was 37% lower than the average level of mortality in the countries of Europe, and the average life expectancy in our country has risen, from about 38 years in 1938 to 69 years. That is, for each year of the existence of our people's state power, the average life expectancy has risen by about 11 months. That is what socialism does for man! Is there a loftier humanism than socialist humanism, which, in 35 years, doubles the average life expectancy of the whole population of the country?" - Mehmet Shehu, "The Magnificent Balance of Victories in the Course of 35 Years of Socialist Albania", Speech (Tiranë: 8 Nëntori Publishing House, 1979), p. 21.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Christ, what a boring lot those Albanians were...!http://www.politicalcrossfire.com/forum/images/smiles/sleeppy.gif

[Led Zeppelin]

"All generalizations are false, including this one." - Mark Twain

[Random Precision]

"...the health service is free of charge for all and has been extended to the remotest villages. In 1960 we had one doctor per every 3,360 inhabitants, in 1978 we had one doctor per every 687 inhabitants, and this despite the rapid growth of the population. The natural increase of the population in our country is 3.5 times higher than the annual average of European countries, whereas mortality in 978 was 37% lower than the average level of mortality in the countries of Europe, and the average life expectancy in our country has risen, from about 38 years in 1938 to 69 years. That is, for each year of the existence of our people's state power, the average life expectancy has risen by about 11 months. That is what socialism does for man! Is there a loftier humanism than socialist humanism, which, in 35 years, doubles the average life expectancy of the whole population of the country?" - Mehmet Shehu, "The Magnificent Balance of Victories in the Course of 35 Years of Socialist Albania", Speech (Tiranë: 8 Nëntori Publishing House, 1979), p. 21.

I thought Mehmet Shehu was a spy for Tito, as well as the KGB and the CIA. :rolleyes:

[Harrycombs]

Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes.
-Vladimir Lenin

and

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

[Niccolò Rossi]

"We do not stand for the point of view of ‘construction of socialism under the direction of the trusts'. We stand for the point of view of the construction of the proletarian society by the class creativity of the workers themselves, not by ukases of ‘captains of industry'...We proceed from trust for the class instinct, to the active class initiative of the proletariat. It cannot be otherwise. If the proletariat does not know how to create the necessary prerequisites for socialist organisation of labour, no-one can do this for it and no-one can compel it to do this. The stick, if raised against the workers, will find itself in the hands of a social force which is either under the influence of another social class or is in the hands of the soviet power; then the soviet power will be forced to seek support against the proletariat from another class (e.g. the peasantry), and by this it will destroy itself as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Socialism and socialist organisation must be set up by the proletariat itself, or they will not be set up at all; something else will be set up - state capitalism." - Ossinsky (‘On the Building of Socialism', Kommunist n°2, April 1918)

"I am not a labor leader. I don't want you to follow me or anyone else. If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of the capitalist wilderness you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into this promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else could lead you out." - Eugene Debs

[#FF0000]

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

Beat me to it.

I could go on and on and on with quotes from Debs.

[Yes]

Be as radical as reality.- V.I. Lenin


It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck. Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, then capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.- Malcolm X


We are a very sick country — I, perhaps, am sicker than most. But I accept that. I told you in the beginning that I am extremist by nature — so it is only right that I should be extremely sick.- Eldridge Cleaver


I've never let my school interfere with my education.
- Mark Twain

[Trystan]

Maybe this thread should get stickied?

[Ismail]

I thought Mehmet Shehu was a spy for Tito, as well as the KGB and the CIA. :rolleyes:He is simply talking about how much socialism did for Albania. Anyone could of made said speech.


Christ, what a boring lot those Albanians were...!Hoxha's speech was dead-on. Any nation that attempts 'peaceful coexistence' (as the USSR under Khrushchev and co advocated, as did Deng, etc.) and shit like that winds up adopting capitalist reforms because that's what 'peaceful coexistence' requires. Capitalism does not allow other economic systems in the world to exist so long as they are a threat to capitalism.

"The fact that atomic war may break out, isn't that class struggle? There is no alternative to class struggle. This is a very serious question. The be-all and end-all is not peaceful coexistence. After all, we have been holding on for some time, and under Stalin we held on to the point where the imperialists felt able to demand point-blank: either surrender such and such positions, or it means war. So far the imperialists haven't renounced that". - Vyacheslav Molotov, 1976

[comrade stalin guevara]

A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal142585.html)

A single death is a tragedy, are million deaths is a statistic.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal391937.html)

Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal388302.html)

Death solves all problems - no man, no problem.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal109570.html)

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal113988.html)

Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal144986.html)

Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal137475.html)

Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal155813.html)

History shows that there are no invincible armies.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal155810.html)

I believe in one thing only, the power of human will.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal378365.html)

I trust no one, not even myself.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal380243.html)

Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don't allow our enemies to have guns, why should we allow them to have ideas?
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal390843.html)

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal136260.html)

If any foreign minister begins to defend to the death a "peace conference," you can be sure his government has already placed its orders for new battleships and airplanes.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal113987.html)

If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal136308.html)

In the Soviet army it takes more courage to retreat than advance.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal128251.html)

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal109571.html)

Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division ;and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal155811.html)

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal137476.html)

Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal137477.html)

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal161352.html)

The only real power comes out of a long rifle.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal378367.html)

The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal390697.html)

The Pope? How many divisions has he got?
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal155814.html)

The writer is the engineer of the human soul.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal164218.html)

We don't let them have ideas. Why would we let them have guns?
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal388500.html)

When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal155812.html)

You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves.
Joseph Stalin (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/josephstal378366.html)

[Ismail]

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those were either fake, modified (and thus fake), or taken out of context. There are a lot of "sinister" Stalin quotes.

[gla22]

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face -- forever." -Orwell

"As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed." -Adam Smith

"Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many." -Adam Smith

We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live - by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody could now endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error. -Nietzsche

"We are going to inherit the earth . There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie may blast and burn its own world before it finally leaves the stage of history. We Are not afraid of ruins. We who ploughed the prairies and built the cities can build again, only better next time. We carry a new world, here in our hearts. That world is growing this minute." -Durruti

I posted some Adam smith ones because it is interesting to see his socialist side.

[Harrycombs]

Maybe this thread should get stickied?

I second this :)

[Holden Caulfield]

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


Stalin was a dweeb for the most part but this is a good quote,

(i third the sticky motion since it is my thread and im an ego maniac)

[Pogue]

Narrator (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001570/): [Tyler steers the car into the opposite lane and accelerates] What are you doing?
Tyler Durden (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000093/): Guys, what would you wish you'd done before you died?
Steph (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0592030/): Paint a self-portrait.
The Mechanic (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0564697/): Build a house.
Tyler Durden (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000093/): [to Narrator] And you?
Narrator (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001570/): I don't know. Turn the wheel now, come on!
Tyler Durden (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000093/): You have to know the answer to this question! If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?
Narrator (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001570/): I don't know, I wouldn't feel anything good about my life, is that what you want to hear me say? Fine. Come on!
Tyler Durden (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000093/): Not good enough.

Tyler Durden (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000093/): I want you to do me a favor.
Narrator (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001570/): Yeah, sure...
Tyler Durden (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000093/): I want you to hit me as hard as you can.
Narrator (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001570/): What?... in the face?
Tyler Durden (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000093/): Surprise me.
Narrator (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001570/): This is so fucking stupid.

Tyler Durden (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000093/): Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

Tyler Durden (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000093/): It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.

Tyler Durden (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000093/): You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.


In the decor of the spectacle, the eye meets only things and their prices.
Commute, work, commute, sleep . . .
Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can and many say, “We will breathe later.”
And most of them don’t die because they are already dead.
Boredom is counterrevolutionary.
We don’t want a world where the guarantee of not dying
of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom.
We want to live.
Don’t beg for the right to live — take it.
In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure
the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society.
The liberation of humanity is all or nothing.
Those who make revolutions half way only dig their own graves.
No replastering, the structure is rotten.
Masochism today takes the form of reformism.
Reform my ass.
The revolution is incredible because it’s really happening.
I came, I saw, I was won over.
Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!
Quick!
If we only have enough time . . .
In any case, no regrets!
Already ten days of happiness.
Live in the moment.
Comrades, if everyone did like us . . .
We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy.
Down with the state.
When the National Assembly becomes a bourgeois theater,
all the bourgeois theaters should be turned into national assemblies.
[Written above the entrance of the occupied Odéon Theater]
Referendum: whether we vote yes or no, it turns us into suckers.
It’s painful to submit to our bosses; it’s even more stupid to choose them.
Let’s not change bosses, let’s change life.
Don’t liberate me — I’ll take care of that.
I’m not a servant of the people (much less of their self-appointed leaders).
Let the people serve themselves.
Abolish class society.
Nature created neither servants nor masters. I want neither to rule nor to be ruled.
We will have good masters as soon as everyone is their own.
“In revolution there are two types of people:
those who make it and those who profit from it.”
(Napoleon)
Warning: ambitious careerists may now be disguised as “progressives.”
Don’t be taken in by the politicos and their filthy demagogy. We must rely on ourselves.
Socialism without freedom is a barracks.
All power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We want structures that serve people, not people serving structures.
The revolution doesn’t belong to the committees, it’s yours.
Politics is in the streets.
Barricades close the streets but open the way.
Our hope can come only from the hopeless.
A proletarian is someone who has no power over his life and knows it.
Never work.
People who work get bored when they don’t work.
People who don’t work never get bored.
Workers of all countries, enjoy!
Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases.
My father before me fought for wage increases.
Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen.
Yet my whole life has been a drag.
Don’t negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them.
The boss needs you, you don’t need the boss.
By stopping our machines together we will demonstrate their weakness.
Occupy the factories.
Power to the workers councils.
(an enragé)
Power to the enragés councils.
(a worker)
Worker: You may be only 25 years old, but your union dates from the last century.
Labor unions are whorehouses.
Comrades, let’s lynch Séguy!
[Georges Séguy: head bureaucrat of the Communist Party-dominated labor union]
Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving it as you would like to find it on entering.
Stalinists, your children are with us!
Man is neither Rousseau’s noble savage nor the Church’s or La Rochefoucauld’s depraved sinner.
He is violent when oppressed, gentle when free.
Conflict is the origin of everything.
(Heraclitus)
If we have to resort to force, don’t sit on the fence.
Be cruel.
Humanity won’t be happy till the last capitalist is hung
with the guts of the last bureaucrat.
When the last sociologist has been hung with the guts of
the last bureaucrat, will we still have “problems”?
The passion of destruction is a creative joy.
(Bakunin)
A single nonrevolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a month of total revolution.
The tears of philistines are the nectar of the gods.
This concerns everyone.
We are all German Jews.
We refuse to be highrised, diplomaed, licensed, inventoried, registered, indoctrinated,
suburbanized, sermonized, beaten, telemanipulated, gassed, booked.
We are all “undesirables.”
We must remain “unadapted.”
The forest precedes man, the desert follows him.
Under the paving stones, the beach.
Concrete breeds apathy.
Coming soon to this location: charming ruins.
Beautiful, maybe not, but O how charming: life versus survival.
“My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I’m not selling bread, I’m selling yeast.”
(Unamuno)
Conservatism is a synonym for rottenness and ugliness.
You are hollow.
You will end up dying of comfort.
Hide yourself, object!
No to coat-and-tie revolution.
A revolution that requires us to sacrifice ourselves for it is Papa’s revolution.
Revolution ceases to be the moment it calls for self-sacrifice.
The prospect of finding pleasure tomorrow will never compensate for today’s boredom.
When people notice they are bored, they stop being bored.
Happiness is a new idea.
Live without dead time.
Those who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring
to everyday reality have a corpse in their mouth.
Culture is an inversion of life.
Poetry is in the streets.
The most beautiful sculpture is a paving stone thrown at a cop’s head.
Art is dead, don’t consume its corpse.
Art is dead, let’s liberate our everyday life.
Art is dead, Godard can’t change that.
Godard: the supreme Swiss Maoist jerk.
Permanent cultural vibration.
We want a wild and ephemeral music.
We propose a fundamental regeneration:
concert strikes,
sound gatherings with collective investigation.
Abolish copyrights: sound structures belong to everyone.
Anarchy is me.
Revolution, I love you.
Down with the abstract, long live the ephemeral.
(Marxist-Pessimist Youth)
Don’t consume Marx, live him.
I’m a Groucho Marxist.
I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires.
Desiring reality is great! Realizing your desires is even better!
Practice wishful thinking.
I declare a permanent state of happiness.
Be realistic, demand the impossible.
Power to the imagination.
Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking.
Imagination is not a gift, it must be conquered.
(Breton)
Action must not be a reaction, but a creation.
Action enables us to overcome divisions and find solutions.
Exaggeration is the beginning of invention.
The enemy of movement is skepticism. Everything that has been realized
comes from dynamism, which comes from spontaneity.
Here, we spontane.
“You must bear a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star.”
(Nietzsche)
Chance must be systematically explored.
Alcohol kills. Take LSD.
Unbutton your mind as often as your fly.
“Every view of things that is not strange is false.”
(Valéry)
Life is elsewhere.
Forget everything you’ve been taught. Start by dreaming.
Form dream committees.
Dare! This word contains all the politics of the present moment.
(Saint-Just)
Arise, ye wretched of the university.
Students are jerks.
The student’s susceptibility to recruitment as a militant for
any cause is a sufficient demonstration of his real impotence.
(enragé women)

[al8]

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. 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.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.
The full "religion is the opiate of the people"-quote from the intro of the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

[Harrycombs]

The most important thing when ill is to never lose heart.
Vladimir Lenin

While the State exists there can be no freedom; when there is freedom there will be no State.
Vladimir Lenin

[Tower of Bebel]

"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!
An old signature of mine:
“When we look at modern man, we have to face the fact that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast with a scientific and technological abundance. We've learned to fly the air as birds, we've learned to swim the seas as fish, yet we haven't learned to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters.”

[Holden Caulfield]

"Today I, a Senator of the Kingdom of Italy, had to use the plough myself because my workers, for centuries loyal to my family, are on strike with the assent of the government"

Giolitti's Retort~
"May I encourage you to continue to do so. You will thus be able to realise how fatiguing it must be and you will pay your workers better"

[Holden Caulfield]

I am feeling rather hyper! I was studying geography just now, and I had a rather interesting idea. Its not about school revolutions this time. How about this - the government, passes a law saying people are prohibited from wearing any shirts apart form this special type of shirt that the government produces. Now this shirt is no ordinary shirt. it is a shirt - Where the buttons go up the back! Therefore, every morning, you are forced to ask someone to help you get dressed. I think this would really encourage a society based upon cooperation - people would have no choice! And if anyone tries to manufacture other shirts, they are shot. And anyone walking about shirtless would be shot. Yes, Rather Totalitarian I know, but hopefully after some time, people would just do it naturally and would not need to be told to wear these shirts, because they would be too busy enjoying life.



guess who it is by

[Os Cangaceiros]

"The nets of American courts are set to catch minnows and let the whales go free."

Eugene Victor Debs

[Random Precision]

Some men, faint-hearted, ever seek
Our programme to retouch,
And will insist, whene’er they speak
That we demand too much.
’Tis passing strange, yet I declare
Such statements give me mirth,
For our demands most moderate are,
We only want the earth.

“Be moderate,” the trimmers cry,
Who dread the tyrants’ thunder.
“You ask too much and people By
From you aghast in wonder.”
’Tis passing strange, for I declare
Such statements give me mirth,
For our demands most moderate are,
We only want the earth.

Our masters all a godly crew,
Whose hearts throb for the poor,
Their sympathies assure us, too,
If our demands were fewer.
Most generous souls! But please observe,
What they enjoy from birth
Is all we ever had the nerve
To ask, that is, the earth.

The “labour fakir” full of guile,
Base doctrine ever preaches,
And whilst he bleeds the rank and file
Tame moderation teaches.
Yet, in despite, we’ll see the day
When, with sword in its girth,
Labour shall march in war array
To realize its own, the earth.

For labour long, with sighs and tears,
To its oppressors knelt.
But never yet, to aught save fears,
Did the heart of tyrant melt.
We need not kneel, our cause no dearth
Of loyal soldiers’ needs
And our victorious rallying cry
Shall be we want the earth!

- James Connolly, 1907

[Valeofruin]

Wow, you guys can't present quotes for shit.

"We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighbouring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands, don’t clutch at us and don’t besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are “free” to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!"- Lenin 'What is to be Done?' (Aka that worthless book that all the social democrats say is unimportant!)

[Valeofruin]

"No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism."- Lenin

Another classic one

[Plagueround]

As much as I enjoyed the book and movie, the fight club quotes don't really belong here. Sorry to piss all over HLVS's contribution, but those are hardly leftist ideas.

Now that I'm done being grumpy, here's a quote I rather love:

"For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is. Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road and encumbering them."

-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

[Post-Something]

"All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of 'man' as an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers." Nietzsche

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Marx

“All that is solid melts into air” Marx

[Tower of Bebel]

A quote with quotes:


...

Oh, before this victory's won, some will have to get thrown in jail some more, but we shall overcome.

Don't worry about us. Before the victory's won, some of us will lose jobs, but we shall overcome.

Before the victory's won, even some will have to face physical death. But if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children from a permanent psychological death, then nothing shall be more redemptive. We shall overcome.

Before the victory's won, some would be misunderstood and called bad names and dismissed as rabble rousers and agitators, but we shall overcome.

And I tell you why: We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

We shall overcome because Carlisle is right, "No lie can live forever."

We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right: "Truth crushed to earth will rise again."

We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right: Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, yet that scaffold sways the future and behind the dim unknown standeth God within the shadows keeping watch above his own.

We shall overcome because the Bible is right: You shall reap what you sow. We shall overcome.

Deep in my heart I do believe we shall overcome.

And with this faith we will go out and adjourn the councils of despair and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism.

And we will be able to rise from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope.

And this will be a great America: we will be the participants in making it so.

So as I leave you this evening, I say:
Walk together children, don’t you get weary.

And whether we will still live, when all this is achieved - alive will be our program, it is redeemed to dominate humanity all over the world, despite everything!

Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

[Random Precision]

From a German War Primer

AMONGST THE HIGHLY PLACED
It is considered low to talk about food.
The fact is: they have
Already eaten.

The lowly must leave this earth
Without having tasted
Any good meat.

For wondering where they come from and
Where they are going
The fine evenings find them
Too exhausted.

They have not yet seen
The mountains and the great sea
When their time is already up.

If the lowly do not
Think about what's low
They will never rise.

THE BREAD OF THE HUNGRY HAS
ALL BEEN EATEN
Meat has become unknown. Useless
The pouring out of the people's sweat.
The laurel groves have been
Lopped down.
From the chimneys of the arms factories
Rises smoke.

THE HOUSE-PAINTER SPEAKS OF
GREAT TIMES TO COME
The forests still grow.
The fields still bear
The cities still stand.
The people still breathe.

ON THE CALENDAR THE DAY IS NOT
YET SHOWN
Every month, every day
Lies open still. One of those days
Is going to be marked with a cross.

THE WORKERS CRY OUT FOR BREAD
The merchants cry out for markets.
The unemployed were hungry. The employed
Are hungry now.
The hands that lay folded are busy again.
They are making shells.

THOSE WHO TAKE THE MEAT FROM THE TABLE
Teach contentment.
Those for whom the contribution is destined
Demand sacrifice.
Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of wonderful times to come.
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.

WHEN THE LEADERS SPEAK OF PEACE
The common folk know
That war is coming.
When the leaders curse war
The mobilization order is already written out.

THOSE AT THE TOP SAY: PEACE
AND WAR
Are of different substance.
But their peace and their war
Are like wind and storm.

War grows from their peace
Like son from his mother
He bears
Her frightful features.

Their war kills
Whatever their peace
Has left over.

ON THE WALL WAS CHALKED:
They want war.
The man who wrote it
Has already fallen.

THOSE AT THE TOP SAY:
This way to glory.
Those down below say:
This way to the grave.

THE WAR WHICH IS COMING
Is not the first one. There were
Other wars before it.
When the last one came to an end
There were conquerors and conquered.
Among the conquered the common people
Starved. Among the conquerors
The common people starved too.

THOSE AT THE TOP SAY COMRADESHIP
Reigns in the army.
The truth of this is seen
In the cookhouse.
In their hearts should be
The selfsame courage. But
On their plates
Are two kinds of rations.

WHEN IT COMES TO MARCHING MANY DO NOT
KNOW
That their enemy is marching at their head.
The voice which gives them their orders
Is their enemy's voice and
The man who speaks of the enemy
Is the enemy himself.

IT IS NIGHT
The married couples
Lie in their beds. The young women
Will bear orphans.

GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.

General, your bomber is powerful.
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.

Bertolt Brecht, 1939

[Knight of Cydonia]

i took the liberty to steal Malatesta's word:


It is not right for us, to say the least....to fall into strife over mere hypotheses

[PostAnarchy]

:star::star:No Gods. No Masters.

or

No Gods No Masters No Countries

:reda::blackA::thumbup::star3:

[Liberte ou la Mort]

Some quotes from George Bernard Shaw.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.

I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.

Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.


Property is organized robbery.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it.

George Bernard Shaw

[Forward Union]

"The Gentry must come down, and the poor shall wear the crown" - Gerrard Winstanley

[Knight of Cydonia]

Bakunin:

if there is a state, there will necessarily be domination, and therefor slavery. A state without slavery, overt or concealed, is unthinkable! and that's why we are enemies of the state

[JacobVardy]

It is a little anarchonistic, but my favorite anti-imperialism quote is from Tacitus' Agricola:


Brigands of the world, after the earth has failed their all-devastating hands, they probe even the sea; if their enemy be wealthy, they are greedy; if he be poor, they are ambitious; neither the East nor the West has glutted them [...]
They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.

And for solidarity, could there be any better argument that that of Thucydides


The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must

[Anarchy w00t]

"The state is killing us and we are watching it on TV" - Zeus The Moose

[Invincible Summer]

From my sig:

"Courage, my friends; 'tis not too late to build a better world." -- Tommy Douglas

"Hasta la victoria, siempre!"
"The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall."
-- Ernesto "Che" Guevara


There's this one quote I can't fully remember, but it was pretty cool - it goes something along the lines of "Where we go, there is no path..." or something like that. Can anyone help me out?

[Incendiarism]

"A person is strong only when he stands upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts from his deepest convictions. Then, whatever the situation he may be in, he always knows what he must say and do. He may fall, but he cannot bring shame upon himself or his causes." -- Mikhail Bakunin

"Anarchism does not mean bloodshed; it does not mean robbery, arson, etc. These monstrosities are, on the contrary, the characteristic features of capitalism." -- August Spies

"If it had not been for this thing, 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 can we hope to do such work for tolerance, 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

"Anarchy leads to Communism, and Communism to Anarchy, both alike being expressions of the predominant tendency in modern societies, the pursuit of equality." -- Peter Kropotkin

"The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists." -- Joseph Ettor

[Holden Caulfield]

By free trade the manafacturers of Manchester are enabled to clothe India, China and South America, and the artisans of Manchester can hardly keep themselves covered from the cold. By dint of free trade Belfast grows more linen cloth than it ever did before; but the men who weave it have hardly a shirt to their backs. Free trade fills with corn the stores of speculating capitalists, but leaves those who have sown and reaped the corn without a meal. Free trade unpeoples villages and peoples poorhouses, consolidates farms and gluts graveyards with famished corpses.
- James Connolly

[Victor]

Our Day will Come
-Bobby Sands


"Praise of Communism"

It's sensible,
anyone can understand it.
It's easy.
You're not an exploiter,
so you can grasp it.
It's a good thing for you,
find out more about it.
The stupid call it stupid
and the squalid call it squalid.
It is against squalor and
against stupidity.
The exploiters call it a crime.
But we know:
It is the end of crime.
It is not madness, but
the end of madness.
It is not the riddle
but the solution.
It is the simple thing,
So hard to achieve.

-Bertolt Brecht


“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 will be in vain. England will 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”
James Connolly


If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.
Che Guevara

[Incendiarism]

"The great only appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise." - James Larkin

[Kibbutznik]

"The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is."

--Unknown, recalled by Howard Zinn


"The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living, and just when they seem to be revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from the names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time honored disguise and borrowed language .... The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past but only from the future."

--Karl Marx


"Hierarchy, class, and ultimately the State penetrate the very integument of the human psyche and establish within it unreflective internal powers of coercion and restraint. In this respect, they achieve a 'sanitizing' authority that no institution or ideology can hope to command. By using guilt and self-blame, the inner State can control behavior long before the fear of the coercive powers of the State have to be invoked. Self-blame, in effect, becomes self-fear--the introjection of social coercion in the form of insecurity, anxiety and guilt."

--Murray Bookchin

[Magdalen]

I just dug up this rather obscure Che quotation. It was used in an article in my organisation's newspaper about 20 years ago.

'When the Rebel leader and his procession entered Havana, bathed in peasants' sweat, with a horizon of mountains and clouds, beneath the burning sun, up a "new stairway of the winter gardens, climbed history with the feet of the people."'
- Che Guevara quoted in FRFI 83, January 1989

[Kamerat]

There is no government, like NO government!Unknown

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lord Acton

Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers. Aristotle

Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least. Robert Byrne

The revenues of Cuban state-run companies are used exclusively for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong.Fidel Castro

The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters. Fidel Castro

[Dóchas]

Our Day will Come -Bobby Sands

Tiocfaidh ár lá is the Irish translation

I like "Capitalists are no more capable of self-sacrifice than a man is capable of lifting himself up by his own bootstraps."- Vladimir Lenin

[Random Precision]

To Whom it May Concern

I was run over by the truth one day.
Ever since the accident I've walked this way
So stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

Heard the alarm clock screaming with pain,
Couldn't find myself so I went back to sleep again
So fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

Every time I shut my eyes all I see is flames
Made a marble phone book and I carved all the names
So coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

I smell something burning, hope it's just my brains.
They're only dropping peppermints and daisy-chains
So stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

Where were you at the time of the crime?
Down by the Cenotaph drinking slime
So chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out,
You take the human being and you twist it all about
So scrub my skin with women,
Chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

Adrian Mitchell, 1964

[Die Neue Zeit]

"In order for the socialist and the worker[-class] movements to become reconciled and to become fused into a single movement, socialism had to break out of the utopian way of thinking. This was the world-historical deed of Marx and Engels. In the Communist Manifesto of 1847 they laid the scientific foundations of a new modern socialism, or, as we say today, of Social Democracy. By so doing, they gave socialism solidity and turned what had hitherto been a beautiful dream of well-meaning enthusiasts into an earnest object of struggle and [also] showed this to be the necessary consequence of economic development. To the fighting proletariat they gave a clear awareness of its historical task and they placed it on a condition to speed to its great goal as quickly and with as few sacrifices as possible. The socialists no longer have the task of freely inventing a new society but rather uncovering its elements in existing society. No more do they have to bring salvation from its misery to the proletariat from above, but rather they have to support its class struggle through increasing its insight and promoting its economic and political organizations, and in so doing bring about as quickly and as painlessly as possible the day when the proletariat will be able to save itself. The task of Social Democracy [as a party] is to make the class struggle of the proletariat aware of its aim and capable of choosing the best means to attain this aim." (Karl Kautsky)

[Forward Union]

My signature!

[Brother No. 1]

quote by Ernesto Che Guevara "The true Revlotionary is guied by great feelings Love"

[Skin_HeadBanger]

quote by Ernesto Che Guevara "The true Revlotionary is guied by great feelings Love"

Although a good quote, the thinking behind it is a little off to me. With everything comes it's opposite, in this case, love comes with hate. A revolutionary would be guided by the love of liberty, the working class, freedom, equality, etc, but also the hatred of the state, of the rich, the fascists, etc.

It's yin and yang. A balance.

[Brother No. 1]

true comrade sorry for that here is another one" if power croupts then absoulut power Croupts absouletly

[Skin_HeadBanger]

true comrade sorry for that here is another one" if power croupts then absoulut power Croupts absouletly

Oh, no. No apologies necessary, brother. You were posting a quote on a quote thread, I just wanted to comment on it.

But the quote in this reply is one of my favorites;):D

[Brother No. 1]

thank you comrade

[Bilan]

"The self-emancipation of our time is an emancipation from the material bases of inverted truth. This “historic mission of establishing truth in the world” can be carried out neither by the isolated individual nor by atomized and manipulated masses, but only and always by the class that is able to dissolve all classes by reducing all power to the de-alienating form of realized democracy — to councils in which practical theory verifies itself and surveys its own actions. This is possible only when individuals are “directly linked to universal history” and dialogue arms itself to impose its own conditions."

- Guy Debord

""To rely on oppressive conditions to radicalize people is unwise; to intentionally worsen them in order to accelerate this process is unacceptable. The repression of certain radical projects may incidentally expose the absurdity of the ruling order; but such projects should be worthwhile for their own sake — they lose their credibility if they are merely pretexts designed to provoke repression. Even in the most “privileged” milieus there are usually more than enough problems without needing to add to them. The point is to reveal the contrast between present conditions and present possibilities; to give people enough taste of real life that they’ll want more."

- Ken Knabb

"people who make revolutions half way only dig their own graves"

[Bilan]

"By forming themselves into permanently organized groups within the trade unions and factories, the communists need to import into these bodies the ideas, theses and tactics of the IIIrd International; they need to exert an influence over union discipline and determine its aims; they need to influence the decisions of the Factory Councils, and transform the rebellious impulses sparked off by the conditions that capitalism has created for the working class into a revolutionary consciousness and creativity. Since they bear the heaviest historical responsibility, the communists in the Party have the greatest interest in evoking, through their ceaseless activity, relations of interpenetration and natural interdependence between the various working-class institutions. It is these relations that leaven discipline and organization with a revolutionary spirit."

Antonio Gramsci

[cyu]

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose. - Don Marquis, Journalist

They say the Pharaohs built the pyramids. Do you think one Pharaoh dropped one bead of sweat? We built the pyramids for the Pharaohs and we're building for them yet.
- Anna Louise Strong

To slavery in the abstract, slavery in the concrete, to slavery absolute, slavery feudal, and the slavery of wages; to slavery where it is, and where it is not; from the first Israelite who leaned his ear against the door, and was pierced with his master's awl to the last son of Adam who shall wear the badge of servitude; to Slavery we are utterly opposed under every phase and modification, and so with firm and solemn purpose will remain until our lives end.
- New York Workingmen, Jan 1845

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
- Anatole France

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.
- A. J. Liebling,

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
- Abraham Lincoln

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and cause me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic destroyed."
- Abraham Lincoln, 1864

Necessity knows no law, and the starving man has a natural right to a share of his neighbor's bread... Ask for work. If they do not give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.
- Emma Goldman

"I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks."
- Eugene Debs

The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. - Helen Keller, 1911

“What? Are we to put difference of party tactics before the desperate needs of the workers? Are we no better than the capitalist politicians who stand in the high places and harangue about petty matters, while millions of the people are underpaid, underfed, thrown out of work and dying?”
- Helen Keller

"My country, right or wrong" is a thing that no patriot would think of saying, except in a desperate case. It is like saying "My mother, drunk or sober." -- G.K. Chesterton

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
- Martin Luther King Jr.

"When I fed the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked, 'Why are they poor?' they called me a communist."
- Dom Helder Camara

The present age handed over the workers, each alone and defenseless, to the unbridled greed of competitors... so that a very few and exceedingly rich men have laid a yoke of almost slavery on the unnumbered masses of non-owning workers. - Pope Leo XIII

All riches come from iniquity, and unless one has lost, another cannot gain. Hence that common opinion seems to be very true, 'the rich man is unjust, or the heir to an unjust one.' Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor. - St. Jerome

You are not making a gift of what is yours to the poor man, but you are giving him back what is his. You have been appropriating things that are meant to be for the common use of everyone. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich.
- Populorum Progressio

"by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself."
- Rerum Novarum

As long as I am mayor of this city the great industries are secure. We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, "That man is a Red, that man is a Communist". You never hear a real American talk like that.
-- Frank Hague, 1896-1956, Jersey City, New Jersey

[bawbag]

"Micky: We're Marxist Trotskyite Anarchists
Del: Then why are you in a rockband?
Micky: Because we wanna be rich Marxist Trotskyite Anarchists"

-Only Fools and Horses



I'm sorry guys:(, I felt obliged

[union6]

"Micky: We're Marxist Trotskyite Anarchists
Del: Then why are you in a rockband?
Micky: Because we wanna be rich Marxist Trotskyite Anarchists"

-Only Fools and Horses



I'm sorry guys:(, I felt obliged


what episode is that from?

[ZeroNowhere]

Although a good quote, the thinking behind it is a little off to me. With everything comes it's opposite, in this case, love comes with hate. A revolutionary would be guided by the love of liberty, the working class, freedom, equality, etc, but also the hatred of the state, of the rich, the fascists, etc.

It's yin and yang. A balance.
Eh. When one lacks a belief in the soul, and thus 'free will', it's not that easy to hate people.

[bawbag]

what episode is that from?

Series 4 Episode 4 - It's Only Rock and Roll

[union6]

cheers, i will look that one up

quote in sig \/

[Arash_Anaraki]

But now with the living conditions deteriorating, and with the sure knowledge that we are slated for destruction, we have been transformed into an implacable army of liberation.

-George Jackson

[destroy and rebuild]

"One must breed a chaos within himself to give birth to a shooting star." - Friedrich Nietzsche

[Kibbutznik]

One of my absolute favourites:

"Well, what I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master's man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brainslack brain workers, nor heartsick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all--the realisation at last of the meaning of the word commonwealth."

~William Morris

[ZeroNowhere]

"If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once and for all. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will."
-Albert Einstein.

“When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behavior is the result of antecedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his birth, and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of imagination… When a motorcar fails to start, we do not attribute its annoying behavior to sin, we do not say, you are a wicked motorcar, and you shall not have any more gasoline until you go.”
-Bertrand Russell.

“I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.”
-Albert Einstein.

"But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be."
-Karl Marx.

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
-Crowfoot.

"Her [Rand's] philosophy, Objectivism, upholds objective reality (as opposed to supernaturalism), reason as man's only means of knowledge (as opposed to faith or skepticism), free will (as opposed to determinism--by biology or environment), and an ethics of rational self-interest (as opposed to the sacrifice of oneself to others or others to self)."
-Michael S. Berliner, board member of the Ayn Rand Institute. I mean, it's opposed to supernaturalism, but... Upholds free will? :laugh:

[MarxSchmarx]

In desert societies ... water is so precious that it is money. People connive and fight and die over it; governments covet it; marriages are even made and broken because of it. If one were to talk to a person who has known only the desert and tell him that in the city there are public water fountains and that children are even sometimes allowed to turn on the fire hydrants in the summer and to frolic in the water, he would be sure one were crazy. For he knows, with an existential certitude, that it is human nature to fight over water.

Mankind has lived now for several millennia in the desert. Our minds and emotions are conditioned by that bitter experience; we do not dare to think that things could be otherwise. Yet there are signs that we are, without really having planned it that way, marching out of the desert. There are some who are loathe to leave behind the consolation of familiar brutalities; there are others who in one way or another would like to impose the law of the desert upon the Promised Land. It may even be possible that mankind cannot bear too much happiness.

It is also possible that we will seize this opportunity and make of the earth a homeland rather than an exile. That is the social project. It does not promise, or even seek, to abolish the human condition, for that is impossible. It does propose to end that invidiuos competition and venality which, because scarcity allowed no other alternatives, we have come to think are inseparable from our humanity.

Michael Harrington, American socialist, 1970.

[Brother No. 1]

War does not determine who is right only who is left.

[John Lenin]

http://c4.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/44/l_0641bf54741b063c47ef45f20a30068b.jpg

[John Lenin]

http://c2.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/24/l_22dd6ffcdda49acea2df8a6042910b0d.jpg

[John Lenin]

http://c1.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/20/l_5c0cb42b64a854037c2ab9b21ae8d6b4.png

[hugsandmarxism]

War does not determine who is right only who is left.

-Bertrand Russel

[Brother No. 1]

So thats who said it.

[Steve_j]

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing. ~John Berger

[Jack]

Probably said already:

The only church that illuminates is a burning church.
-Durruti

[Knight of Cydonia]

"We march by banks of Ruhr and Rhine
And smash the Hitler Youth in twain.
Our song is freedom, love and life,
We’re the Pirates of the Edelweiss."

-The Edelweiss Pirates (http://libcom.org/history/articles/edelweiss-pirates)

[Brother No. 1]

"Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of
our party." - Joseph Stalin

[LOLseph Stalin]

"Socialism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen"- Leon Trotsky.

[Brother No. 1]

"The ones who casts votes decide nothing,the ones who count them decide everything."-Joseph Stalin

[LOLseph Stalin]

"Fascism is Capitalism in decay".- Vladimir Lenin.

[Brother No. 1]

"Religion is a beast of opression"-Karl Heinriech Marx

[LOLseph Stalin]

"Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first, nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first."
(Charles de Gaulle)

[Brother No. 1]

"Workers of the World Unite!"-all Communist and Socialist leaders.

[LOLseph Stalin]

“Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!”- Karl Marx

Haha! Had to put the German original. :)

[Blackscare]

We, Makhnovist insurgents, are not sitting at home, although each one of us also has a family and relatives and loved ones from whom we do not wish to be separated. But we are revolutionaries. It is not possible for us to look on indifferently as the working people are once again thrown into slavery, as new despots lord it over us, unchecked, under the mask of the socialist-communists, under the banner of worker-peasant authority. Three years of revolution have clearly shown that every authority is counter-revolutionary, without exception, whether it be the authority of Bloody Nicholas or of the Bolshevik-Communists. We Makhnovists raise the banner of revolt for a total socialist revolution, against every authority, against every oppressor; we are fighting for the free Soviets of the working people.

~Insurgent Makhnovists

[LOLseph Stalin]

http://thinkexist.com/i/sq/4star.gif http://thinkexist.com/i/sq/ThumbsUp.gif http://thinkexist.com/i/sq/ThumbsDwn.gif“When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist. (http://thinkexist.com/quotation/when_i_gave_food_to_the_poor-they_called_me_a/250364.html)” - Dom Helder Camara

[Blackscare]

But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a moldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children?

~Peter Kropotkin

[Brother No. 1]

"We must show the peasants that the organisation of industry on the basis of modern, advanced technology, on electrification which will provide a link between town and country, will put an end to the division between town and country, will make it possible to raise the level of culture in the countryside and to overcome, even in the most remote corners of land, backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease, and barbarism."-Lenin

[LOLseph Stalin]

"One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic." -Josef Stalin

[Blackscare]

If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

Mikhail Bakunin

[Brother No. 1]

"...Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organising their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world ...". -Lenin

[LOLseph Stalin]

"Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man."- Leon Trotsky

[Blackscare]

The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation. Emma Goldman

[Brother No. 1]

"Socialism in one Country is our Solution"-Stalin

[Brother No. 1]

"There are two kinds of personality cults. One is a healthy personality cult, that is, to worship men like Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. Because they hold the truth in their hands. The other is a false personality cult, i.e. not analyzed and blind worship"-Mao Tse-Tung

[Brother No. 1]

"I warn you, I am just beginning! If there is in your hearts a vestige of love for your country, love for humanity, love for justice, listen carefully... I know that the regime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regime) will try to suppress the truth by all possible means; I know that there will be a conspiracy to bury me in oblivion. But my voice will not be stifled – it will rise from my breast even when I feel most alone, and my heart will give it all the fire that callous cowards deny it... Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me"-Fidel Castro,1953

[LOLseph Stalin]

"One man with a gun can control 100 without one".- Vladimir Lenin

[Brother No. 1]

"As I have said before, the ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness, poverty or hunger."-Fidel Castro 2002

[LOLseph Stalin]

"Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot".- Vladimir Lenin

[Brother No. 1]

"Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men — how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?"-Che Guevara,Talking to the UN about thier Black policy in 1964,NY

[LOLseph Stalin]

"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

[Brother No. 1]

"Is it true that liberty Precious; so Precious that it must be carefuly Rationed."-Vladimir Lenin

[LOLseph Stalin]

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

[Brother No. 1]

"When I visited the CCCP I was treated like a actual human being."-Paul Robertson

[LOLseph Stalin]

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."- Emma Goldman

[Brother No. 1]

"There are 2 Communist ways. #1 Dictatorship of the Proletariat. #2 Dictatorship for the proletariat."-my self:D:D

[LOLseph Stalin]

"Demarchy: Representation by random selection."- Me

Just thought I would post one of my own too. :)

[Brother No. 1]

"Lenin proved that masses can govern a state.
Stalin proved that a person can govern a state.
Khruschev proved that a fool can govern a state.
Brezhnev proved that it is possible not to govern a state at all.
And Andropov proved that if to begin to govern a state after it you'd not leave a long."

[Pogue]

"The ones who casts votes decide nothing,the ones who count them decide everything."-Joseph Stalin

Why would you like this quote? Its hardly inspiring or original.

[Pogue]

"When I visited the CCCP I was treated like a actual human being."-Paul Robertson

Paul Robertson also was fearful for the safety of his Jewish friend she travelled with due to how the Soviet Union didn't treat Jews like actual human beings.

[Pogue]

"Socialism in one Country is our Solution"-Stalin

No, it was doomed to fail, and it did, because its impossible. Everyone on the left recognises this, and some recognise it wasn't socialism at all. Why do you say these are great quotes?

[Holden Caulfield]

"You know what the funniest things about Revleft are, to me? When somebody posts something and Malte comes in and says the opposite of what everybody wanted, and because he OWNS THE DAMN SITE its like Rambo just came in and owned everybody"

-Yazman

[RedAnarchist]

"When I visited the CCCP I was treated like a actual human being."-Paul Robertson

Do you mean Paul Robeson?

[Brother No. 1]

yes. it was either Robertson or Robeson.

[Mike Rotchtickles]

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed -Steve Biko

[Mir]

“Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.”
- Mikhail Gorbachev

[Velkas]

It is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists.
-Peter Kropotkin

I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.
-Mikhail Bakunin

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

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
-Mikhail Bakunin

[Hoxhaist]

"Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage... I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again" - Eugene V. Debs

"While there is a lower class, I am in it; While there is a criminal element, I am of it; While there is a soul in prison, I am not free!" - Eugene V. Debs

"You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future." - Thomas Sankara

[Communist Theory]

Hasta La Victoria Siempre -Homer Simpson

[Code]

"When the class enemy is physically stronger than we are, we should be peaceful. When we are stronger than the class enemy, we should kick their asses. But there's no reason for a lot of public yap about this, one way or the other. We're not under any obligation to commit ourselves to either violence or non-violence."


-RedStar2000




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


-Che Guevara






"To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time. "


-Leonard Bernstein






If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.


-Vladimir Lenin




"I've been married to one Marxist and one Fascist, and neither one would take the garbage out.”
-Lee Grant


"Anarchism does not mean bloodshed; it does not mean robbery, arson, etc. These monstrosities are, on the contrary, the characteristic features of capitalism. Anarchism means peace and tranquility to all."
-August Spies, Haymarket anarchist


“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
- Mao Tse-Tung


“Those who hate most fervently must have once loved deeply; those who want to deny the world must have once embraced what they now set on fire.”
-Kurt Tucholsky


“Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream”
-Nathaniel Hawthorne


“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


"You can't pay attention to your mistakes. I made a mistake today, I made a mistake yesterday. I think it's ... very important to ignore the negative."
-Jerry Rubin


"We were free until we stopped fighting, now no one has freedom."
-Chief Tawonka



"Where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself."
-Chairman Mao



"The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it."
-Abbie Hoffman



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


Check out my blog: codes-blog.blogspot.com

[kbjami]

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." (Gandhi).

[kbjami]

"Sell a man a fish he eats for a day. Teach a man how to fish, ruins a good business opportunity" (Marx).

This quote makes me laugh.

[kbjami]

"Ideas are weapons too"

Sorry I forget who said this, but it was always stuck in my head.

[kbjami]

"I'm not a liberator. Liberators don't exist. The people liberate themselves" (Che Guevara).

[Brother No. 1]

"Ideas are more powerful then weapons so why should we let ourt enemies have Ideas and weapons?"-Joseph Stalin

I think this is what it was comrade.

[kbjami]

“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).

[Stranger Than Paradise]

This one's a real monster from Bakunin, I have some of it in my signature:

“To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures that have neither the right, nor wisdom, nor virtue.... To be governed means that at every move, operation, or transaction one is noted, registered, entered in a census, taxed, stamped, priced, assessed, patented, licensed, authorised, recommended, admonished, prevented, reformed, set right, corrected. Government means to be subjected to tribute, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolised, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed; all in the name of public utility and the general good. Then, at the first sign of resistance or word of complaint, one is repressed, fined, despised, vexed, pursued, hustled, beaten up, garrotted, imprisoned, shot, machine-gunned, judged, sentenced, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to cap it all, ridiculed, mocked, outraged, and dishonoured. That is government, that is its
justice and its morality!... O human personality! How can it be that you have cowered in such subjection for sixty centuries?”

Mikhail Bakunin

[Weezer]

"Ideas are more powerful then weapons so why should we let ourt enemies have Ideas and weapons?"-Joseph Stalin

I think this is what it was comrade.

I'm afraid to know who Stalin means by enemies.

[Hoxhaist]

"Protest is when I say this does not please me.
Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more."
- Ulrike Meinhof

[Velkas]

Some good quotes:

When the rich wage war, it is the poor who die.

One single war — we all know — may be productive of more evil, immediate and subsequent, than hundreds of years of the unchecked action of the mutual-aid principle may be productive of good.

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.

[MilitantAnarchist]

Dunno who said it but i like it:
The people who mind dont matter, and the people who matter dont mind.

[nuisance]

This one's a real monster from Bakunin, I have some of it in my signature:

“To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures that have neither the right, nor wisdom, nor virtue.... To be governed means that at every move, operation, or transaction one is noted, registered, entered in a census, taxed, stamped, priced, assessed, patented, licensed, authorised, recommended, admonished, prevented, reformed, set right, corrected. Government means to be subjected to tribute, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolised, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed; all in the name of public utility and the general good. Then, at the first sign of resistance or word of complaint, one is repressed, fined, despised, vexed, pursued, hustled, beaten up, garrotted, imprisoned, shot, machine-gunned, judged, sentenced, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to cap it all, ridiculed, mocked, outraged, and dishonoured. That is government, that is its
justice and its morality!... O human personality! How can it be that you have cowered in such subjection for sixty centuries?”

Mikhail Bakunin
That's actually by Proudhon.

[Il Medico]

"It is better to sit quietly and appear to be dumb then it is to open your mouth and remove all doubt." - Mark Twain

"Education is what is left after you forget everything you learned in school" - Albert Einstein

"Sell a man a fish he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity." - Karl Marx

“I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. People liberate themselves.” - Che Guevara

“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” - Mao Zedong

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seeks to win.”- Sun-Tzu

“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both” - Ben Franklin

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupry

“Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.” - Steve Wozniak

“When I give food to the poor they call me a saint, when I ask why the poor have no food they call me a communist” - Dom Helder Camara

“Words have both the power to destroy and heal. When words are both true and kind they can change our world” - The Buddha

“Give a man a fish you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish you feed him for a life time.”
- Lao-Tzu

“You can get more of what you want with a kind word and a gun then you can with just a kind word.” - Al Capone

“True glory consist in doing what deserves to be written and writing what deserves to be read” - Pliny the Elder

“It is always darkest before it is totally black” - Mao Zedong

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” Galileo Galilei

“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy” - Unknown

“I am become death, the Shatterer of worlds.” - J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the “The Bhagavad-Gita”

“In this great future you can’t forget your past.” - Bob Marley

“In passively accepting an unjust system the oppressed become just as evil as their oppressors.” - Martin Luther King

“I will not accept any communist system that dose not end the exploitation of man by man” - Che Guevara

[generation why]

Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.

Eugene V. Debs

[Velkas]

Some Marx quotes:

The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it

[JimmyJazz]

"I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night it came to me this way--I don't know how it was, but it came: (1) That we could not give them [the Phillipine Islands] back to Spain--that would be cowardly and dishonorable; (2) that we could not turn them over to France or Germany--our commercial rivals in the Orient--that would be bad business and discreditable; (3) that we could not leave them to themselves--they were unfit for self-government--and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was; and (4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died."

--William McKinley, President of the United States, 1899 (taken from Killing Hope by William Blum)


"I absolutely insist on protecting private property."

"We stand for the maintenance of private property ... We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic order."

--Adolf Hitler

[Random Precision]

The party is the nervous system of the working class, its brain. The leaders and the key members perform the role of brain and nervous system within the organism of the party also. This comparison must not be taken in a literal sense: functions in a biological organism are differentiated in a manner very different from the allocation of functions in a social group. But, however politic-ally conscious they may be, the rank and file of the party is unable to get to know the situation as a whole. Whatever the personal worth of these comrades, they must inevitably lack information, liaison, training and the revolutionary’s theoretical and professional preparation, if they are not within that core of party members who have been selected and tried by long years of struggle and work, enjoy the goodwill of the movement as a whole, have access to the apparatus of the party, and are accustomed to thinking and working collectively. Just as the soldier in the trenches sees only a tiny portion of the battlefield and cannot, whatever his personal talents may be, acquire a clear picture of the action under way, just as the engineering worker at his machine cannot take in the functioning of the whole factory at a glance, so the rank-and-file party member, on the basis of his own resources, can only make his mind up through general ideas and judgements, and through acquaintance with a partial area of reality.

True proletarian leaders are, all at the same time, guides, pilots, captains and directors: of enterprises: I mean the formidable enter-prise of demolishing a social system and constructing another. They have to uncover, by the scientific analysis of historic processes, the tendency of events and the possibilities that are open in them. They have to grasp the action that is possible and necessary for the proletariat, according with historical necessity and not with its wish or hope of the moment. In a word, they must see reality, grasp possibility, and conceive the action which will be the link between the real and the possible. In doing so, the only vantage-point they can ever adopt is that of the proletariat’s own higher interests. Their whole thinking has to be that of the proletariat, with the advantage of scientific discipline. Proletarian class-consciousness attains its highest expression in the leaders of the organized vanguard of the working class. As personalities, they are great only in the measure that they incarnate the masses. In this sense only they are giants – anonymous giants. In voicing the consciousness of the mass they display a virtue which, for the proletariat, is sheer necessity: a terrible impersonality.

So much is true. But the value of such leaders – the genius of a Lenin – lies in the fact that the development of class-consciousness is not foreordained from all time; mass consciousness can remain latent and unexpressed at a particular moment; the possibilities contained in the situation need never be perceived; the action necessary for the victory or the safety of the proletariat may never be devised. The recent history of the proletariat in western Europe offers only too many examples of opportunities missed through the failure of class consciousness to crystallize.

We can define the proletarian leader, finally, this man of a new epoch, by contrasting him with the leaders of the possessing classes both of today and of previous eras. The latter are the blind instruments of history; the revolutionary is its conscious instrument.

- Victor Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution

[JimmyJazz]

"The realization that the critique of capitalism does not automatically tell us much about socialism has certainly been traumatic. It is now clear that the 'expropriation of the expropriators' by itself may produce a noncapitalist society, but not necessarily a desirable one. It is also clear that capitalist evolution has provided much that older socialists thought impossible, and that this fore-taste of what used to be utopia is not very desirable either. We now have much of what a Spanish anarchist congress in 1898 forecast as the glorious future of man after the revolution, namely a world of high-rise buildings full of elevators, electricity, and automatic rubbish disposal, and inhabited by supervisors of automated machinery. This, as we know, is as far from utopia as the abolition of the distinction between town and country by means of radio, television, and the internal combustion engine. Still, if the left may have to think more seriously about the new society, that does not make it any the less desirable or necessary, or the case against the present one any less compelling."

--Eric Hobsbawm (in 1978)

I mostly know Hobsbawm's politics from this commonly cited interview (http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTI1ZmM0MjgzMjhiZTBkNmE3ZDU5NGVkNDczNWI4NTg=), so I was a little surprised to hear the very thoughtful side of him reflected in the quote above.

[JimmyJazz]

We can define the proletarian leader, finally, this man of a new epoch, by contrasting him with the leaders of the possessing classes both of today and of previous eras. The latter are the blind instruments of history; the revolutionary [thinks he] is its conscious instrument.

With the bracketed correction, this is precisely the danger of Party rule. In Marx and Engels, the proletariat as a class is history's conscious instrument, not some Party that claims to represent the proletariat. This is quite simply a massive revision of Marxism. Note that I'm not saying that the proletariat doesn't need a party to represent/lead it; only that this exact quote is a revision of Marxism, and a scary one at that.

[JimmyJazz]

"Utopian construction is the third member of the trinity of vicious abstractions whose other two members are socialist compromise and anarchist intransigence."--Sidney Hook

[Random Precision]

With the bracketed correction, this is precisely the danger of Party rule. In Marx and Engels, the proletariat as a class is history's conscious instrument, not some Party that claims to represent the proletariat. This is quite simply a massive revision of Marxism.

I don't see how. Serge doesn't substitute the party for the proletariat, he is explaining the relation between the two. And I don't see what the difference is between the proletariat being a conscious actor of history and its leaders being the same. Are they kept from that distinction merely because they are authority figures who might betray the class?

[NapAnon]

Equality is mutual relations with the solidarity arising from it, this is the most powerful weapon of the animal world in the struggle for existence. And equality is equity.- Peter Kropotkin

By flinging over overboard law, religion, and authority, mankind can regain possesion of the moral principle which has been taken from them.- Peter Kropotkin

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it. -Noam Chomsky


The Capitalist Swine Flu is much deadlier- Subcomandante Marcos

[thundertail19921]

These are awesome quotes!

[JimmyJazz]

I don't see how. Serge doesn't substitute the party for the proletariat, he is explaining the relation between the two. And I don't see what the difference is between the proletariat being a conscious actor of history and its leaders being the same. Are they kept from that distinction merely because they are authority figures who might betray the class?

I typed out two responses to this and deleted them both. I guess that I can't articulate any precise theoretical answer for why I don't like the quote. It's more a case of perceived slippery slope, I suppose. It's much like judging the level of centralization in a society, where there is no black/white distinction to be made (at least not for people who are grounded in historical reality) between a "totalitarian" and a "free" society; there is only a continuum of more centralized vs. less centralized ways of ordering society.

All history is the history of class struggles leading to changes in the mode of production. But in no former change in the mode of production did they have the fully articulated historical materialism that we have had since Marx. The bourgeoisie didn't have it when they overthrew feudalism; they just did it. I don't have a problem with the working class having Marxist historical materialism to help it see more clearly where it is going, of course. And I also don't have a problem with there being a Party which helps to inform and educate the working class about historical materialism. But it is at the point where you say that the Party itself is the conscious tool of history--and the proletariat is what?--that I think you've abandoned an important part of Marxism. Frankly, I'm just not sure how you don't also see this type of thinking about the Party as a fairly direct (ideological) cause of Stalin's excesses. A party should be considered the tool of the proletariat, not of history directly.

[Glenn Beck]

I typed out two responses to this and deleted them both. I guess that I can't articulate any precise theoretical answer for why I don't like the quote. It's more a case of perceived slippery slope, I suppose. It's much like judging the level of centralization in a society, where there is no black/white distinction to be made (at least not for people who are grounded in historical reality) between a "totalitarian" and a "free" society; there is only a continuum of more centralized vs. less centralized ways of ordering society.

All history is the history of class struggles leading to changes in the mode of production. But in no former change in the mode of production did they have the fully articulated historical materialism that we have had since Marx. The bourgeoisie didn't have it when they overthrew feudalism; they just did it. I don't have a problem with the working class having Marxist historical materialism to help it see more clearly where it is going, of course. And I also don't have a problem with there being a Party which helps to inform and educate the working class about historical materialism. But it is at the point where you say that the Party itself is the conscious tool of history--and the proletariat is what?--that I think you've abandoned an important part of Marxism. Frankly, I'm just not sure how you don't also see this type of thinking about the Party as a fairly direct (ideological) cause of Stalin's excesses.

That is why the proletariat is special, it is the last class and the only one theoretically capable of becoming the subject rather than object of history. With the attainment of communism man becomes the architect of his own destiny rather than being pushed around by 'inhuman forces', the contradictions of class society.

[JimmyJazz]

Yes, that's why the proletariat is special. And a Party is special if, and because, it belongs to the proletariat. It should be considered a historical force only insofar as it is used by a greater historical force, the proletariat.

[Rood]

Ernesto Che Guevara:

“Better to die standing, than to live on your knees.”

“It's a sad thing not to have friends, but it is even more sad not to have enemies.”


Vladimir Lenin :

"The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation."

“A lie told often enough becomes truth”

“One man with a gun can control 100 without one. ”

"Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.”

“Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.”

"Social democrates are the most dangerous type of politician's, they talk left but stab you from behind"

Leon Trotsky :

"Socialism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen."

"Religions are illogical primitive ignorance. There is nothing as ridiculous and tragic as a religious government."

Rosa Luxemburg :

"Those who do not move, do not notice their chains."

Antifa .

"IF IT TAKES A VOICE - SHOUT THE TRUTH, IF IT TAKES A HAND - HOLD THEM BACK, IF IT TAKES A FIST - SMASH THEM DOWN. This is free Europe, facism never again."







Never forget:

"El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido"

[Soldier of life]

''Political theories, discussions and ideas are part of a language. This language must be translated by revolutionaries into definate, concrete action. If this is not done then our goals will be reduced to masterful dreams. We must act in thought and always think of action. If one cannot translate theory into action, well then they cease to be a revolutionary''

[Jack]

Ernesto Che Guevara:

“Better to die standing, than to live on your knees.”

That was Zapata, stop attributing every somewhat romantic quote to Che.

[The Essence Of Flame Is The Essence Of Change]

''The revolutionist is a damned man. He has no personal interest, feelings or inclinations; no property, not even a name. Everything in him is consumed by one single interest., by one single thought, one single passion---the revolution.''
-Mikhail Bakunin


''Should a society dares sacrificing a finger of freedom for security it does not deserve neither of the two goods and will end up losing both"
-Benjamin Franklin


"Anarchism is organisation, organisation, and more organisation."
-Errico Malatesta


“Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day.Teach a man to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime”
-Ancient Chinese Proverb


"Oh, judge, your damn laws: the ''good'' people don't need them and the ''bad'' people don't follow them, so what good are they?"
-Ammon Hennacy


"Don't you dare speak to me of liberty!-The poverty, here is the true slavery."
-Bakunin once again


"When we see a youngling curving his back, pressing thus his chest and lungs we tell him to rise up and keep his head high and chest flat so he can breath better.Subsequently however we teach him physiology so he can choose on his own what's best for him"
-Peter Kropotkin

[tommy_castro]

"There will be no prison which can hold our movement down... The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people" - Huey P. Newton

"Behind me there are those far more radical than I" - Fidel Castro

[RedBlackFreedom]

A few quotes I like:

"Liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality"
"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick.'" - Mikhail Bakunin


"I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves."- Ernesto Che Guevara

[Radical]

Some of my favourite quotes -

"My country is the world and my religion is to do good" - Thomas Paine

"I began revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I would 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

"I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves." - Che Guevara

[Muzk]

Has
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs already been mentioned?

Couldn't find it so, why not add it

[RedSonRising]

Although a good quote, the thinking behind it is a little off to me. With everything comes it's opposite, in this case, love comes with hate. A revolutionary would be guided by the love of liberty, the working class, freedom, equality, etc, but also the hatred of the state, of the rich, the fascists, etc.

It's yin and yang. A balance.

I think Guevara would agree, hence this other quote providing the "yin" if you will:

"Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy."


This one I think sums up the goal of revolutionary class struggle:

"Man's freedom is lacking if somebody else controls what he needs, for need may result in man's enslavement of man." - Qaddafi

[ZeroNowhere]

"As it is, there’s never any opportunity here for an occasional outburst of high spirits, the life I lead being all that the most splendiferous philistine could desire, a quiet, uneventful existence, replete with godliness and respectability; I sit in my room and work, hardly ever go out, am as staid as a German. If things go on like this, I fear that the Almighty may overlook my writings and admit me to heaven."
-Friedrich Engels.

"The issue is purely one of principle: is the struggle to be conducted as a class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, or is it to be permitted that in good opportunist (or as it is called in the Socialist translation: possibilist) style the class character of the movement, together with the programme, are everywhere to be dropped where there is a chance of winning more votes, more adherents, by this means."
-Engels

"Where the state is itself a capitalist producer, as in the exploitation of mines, forests, etc., its product is a “commodity” and hence possesses the specific character of every other commodity."
-Marx

"The fairness of political economy, such as it truly lays down the laws which rule actual society, that fairness is all on one side — on that of Capital. Let, then, the old motto be buried for ever and replaced by another:

"Possession of the Means of Work —
Raw Material, Factories, Machinery —
By the Working People Themselves."
-Engels.

"The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question."
-Marx

"The philosophers would only have to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, to recognize it as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realize that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life."
-Marx

"Where speculation ends -- in real life -- there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history."
-Marx

"Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.

In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations."
-Marx.

"All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice."
-Marx.

"Socialism is that social system under which the necessaries of production are owned, controlled, and administered by the people, for the people, and under which, accordingly, the cause of political and economic despotism having been abolished, class rule is at end. -- That is socialism, nothing short of that."
-Daniel De Leon.

"These poor, weak-minded men, during the course of their generally very obscure lives, had been so little accustomed to anything like success, that they actually believed their paltry amendments, passed with two or three votes majority, would change the face of Europe. They had, from the beginning of their legislative career, been more imbued than any other faction of the Assembly with that incurable malady Parliamentary cretinism, a disorder which penetrates its unfortunate victims with the solemn conviction that the whole world, its history and future, are governed and determined by a majority of votes in that particular representative body which has the honor to count them among its members, and that all and everything going on outside the walls of their house—wars, revolutions, railway-constructing, colonizing of whole new continents, California gold discoveries, Central American canals, Russian armies, and whatever else may have some little claim to influence upon the destinies of mankind—is nothing compared with the incommensurable events hinging upon the important question, whatever it may be, just at that moment occupying the attention of their honorable house."
-Engels.

"Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines about itself is true."
-Marx.

"The social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of antiquity, glorifies the serfdom of the Middle Ages and are capable, in case of need, of defending the oppression of the proletariat, with somewhat doleful grimaces.

"The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and for the latter all they have to offer is the pious wish that the former may be charitable.

"The social principles of Christianity place the Consistorial Counsellor’s compensation for all infamies in heaven, and thereby justify the continuation of these infamies on earth.

"The social principles of Christianity declare all the vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either a just punishment for original sin and other sins, or trials which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed.

"The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread.

"The social principles of Christianity are sneaking and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary.

"So much for the social principles of Christianity."
-Marx.

"Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system."
-Marx

"More than this, there are plenty of symptoms that the working class of this country is awakening to the consciousness that it has for some time been moving in the wrong groove; that the present movements for higher wages and shorter hours exclusively, keep it in a vicious circle out of which there is no issue; that it is not the lowness of wages which forms the fundamental evil, but the wages system itself. This knowledge once generally spread amongst the working class, the position of Trades Unions must change considerably. They will no longer enjoy the privilege of being the only organisations of the working class. At the side of, or above, the Unions of special trades there must spring up a general Union, a political organisation of the working class as a whole."
-Engels.

"Only a few years ago a charity fair was held in Paris. The affair was gotten up upon a large scale, so large a scale that a new building had to be hastily improvised for the bazaar and ball. In the midst of the festivities the flimsy structure took fire. The pitch, with which the joists of the roof had been fastened, melted and rained down a scalding shower upon the heads of the celebrants; what with that and the flames that leaped up and across from all directions, a panic broke out; men trampled upon women, women upon children, all upon each, each upon all. A large crowd, comporting itself a minute before in civilized and considerate manner, were turned into hyenas. Which was an exhibition of human nature? When each individual in that crowd vied with each other individual in politeness and considerateness, or when all became like wild beasts? The Boston Sunday Herald and the lay and clerical elements, whose opinion it utters, answer: “The latter.” Socialism answers: “Both.”"
-Daniel De Leon. In fact, the rest of the article (http://slp.org/pdf/de_leon/eds1906/1906--May27.pdf) is also a great attack on the whole 'human nature' argument, made a few centuries ago. I would take issue with the final line (I'm not sure if DL was consistent on that, he doesn't mention it much other than here), but nevertheless, it's a good piece. Of course, now we have sociobiologists to contend with, but that's not much of a threat, really.

"The program of Revolution is Revolution. Palliatives are props to that which the Revolution intends to overthrow. No such prop can be within the contemplation, hence part of the program of Socialism."
-De Leon.

"The Capitalist is the right hand, the Labor Fakir is the left hand of the Beast Capital that to-day is “holding up” and plundering the Working Class. That Beast can not be fought if either of his hands is left free. The bona fide fight upon the Beast must be a fight to the knife against his Right and Left hand simultaneously."
-De Leon.

"Crosby overlooks all the real points in the matter, and he tries to argue onto safe ground by holding up a few of the effects of “expansion.” Those effects of expansion are only the effects of capitalism, and in order to do away with them, it is necessary to do away with capitalism. That is the mission of the Socialist Labor Party, and Crosby is miles from the conflict when he joins in the anti-imperialistic kite flying."
-De Leon.

"The capitalist class knows no country and no race, and any 'God' suits it so that "God" approve of the exploitation of the worker. Despite all seeming wranglings, sometimes even wars, among them, the capitalist class is international, and presents a united front against the working class. But for that very reason the capitalist class is interested in keeping the workingmen divided among themselves. Hence it foments race and religious animosities that come down from the past."
-Daniel De Leon.

"Original liberalism was "a perfect Utopia." Up-to-date liberalism is a perfect bunco game."
-Daniel De Leon.

"The Socialist hates the iniquity, but pities the perpetrator and bends his efforts to remove the conditions that made the iniquity possible -- the Socialist, accordingly, attacks the evil at its root. The non-Socialist hates the perpetrator and visits punishment upon him, yet cultivates the social conditions that bred the iniquity -- the non-Socialist, accordingly, waters the roots of the iniquity itself.

"The Socialist holds capitalist society responsible for Rockefeller, not Rockefeller for capitalist society; the non- Socialist holds Rockefeller guilty, and acquits capitalist society.

"The Socialist is firm, relentless, aggressive. But there is no malice or personal hatred in his firmness, relentlessness or aggressiveness -- any more than there is malice or personal hatred in the act of the surgeon who plunges his scalpel deep into the abscess that he treats."
-Daniel De Leon.

"Indeed, "State Socialism" is a contradiction in terms. We shall either have Socialism -- and that means that the State shall have vanished; or we shall preserve the State, and then we shall have no Socialism."
-Daniel De Leon.

"I read: "philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of 'Reality' than Plato got,...". What a strange situation. How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further! Was it because Plato was so extremely clever?"
-Ludwig Wittgenstein.

"When they assume this money-shape, commodities strip off every trace of their natural use-value, and of the particular kind of labour to which they owe their creation, in order to transform themselves into the uniform, socially recognised incarnation of homogeneous human labour. We cannot tell from the mere look of a piece of money, for what particular commodity it has been exchanged. Under their money-form all commodities look alike. Hence, money may be dirt, although dirt is not money."
-Marx.

“Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?
No, Gods, I am no idle votarist! ...
Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,
Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.
... Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads:
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed;
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench: This is it
That makes the wappen’d widow wed again;
She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day again. Come, damned earth,
Thou common whore of mankind, that put’st odds
Among the rout of nations.”
-Shakespeare. This bit was selected by Marx, and is probably most relevant here (since I'm assuming we're just using quotes about socialism and such).

"The busiest streets of London are crowded with shops whose show cases display all the riches of the world, Indian shawls, American revolvers, Chinese porcelain, Parisian corsets, furs from Russia and species from the tropics, but all of these worldly things bear odious, white paper labels with Arabic numerals and then laconic symbols £. s. d. This is how commodities are presented in circulation."
-Marx.

"All power to the Socialist Industrial Union!"
-Old SLP slogan.

...That took a while, but should be helpful for future reference, at least.

[brigadista]

Fervor (http://www.definitions.net/definition/Fervor) is the weapon (http://www.definitions.net/definition/weapon) of choice (http://www.definitions.net/definition/choice) for the impotent.
Franz Fanon


Your father has been a man who acted according to his beliefs and certainly has been faithful to his convictions.
Grow up as good revolutionaries. Study hard to be able to dominate the techniques that permit the domination of nature. Remember that the Revolution is what is important and that each of us, on our own, is worthless.
Above all, try always to be able to feel deeply any injustice committed against any person in any part of the world. It is the most beautiful quality of a revolutionary.
Until always, little children. I still hope to see you again. A really big kiss and a hug from Papa

che guevara - letter to his children

[Pogue]

"I love you"

[Die Rote Fahne]

Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat.
Rosa Luxembourg

[Knight of Cydonia]

"Rakyat Bersatu, tak bisa dikalahkan!" ( Peoples unite, is unbeatable!)

[Искра]

Shut up you mindless philosopher.
C3P0 - robot from Star Wars

[CELMX]

"The human race, in all its poverty, has only one truly effective weapon: laughter. Against the assault of laughter -nothing can stand."
~Mark Twain

"I can do no wrong... for I do not know what it is."
~The Mysterious Stranger

just a side note, i think it's quite curious how Mark Twain turns from this joyful man, who embraces childhood (tom sawyer, huck finn, etc.) into a cynical man who finds life unpurposeful and short (The Mysterious STranger)

[zapatista]

Not sure if it has been mentioned yet but..

'It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees' - Emiliano Zapata

[The Accomplice]

"The idea of creating systems designed to threaten, coerce, and kill, and to imbue such agencies with principled legitimacy, and not expect them to lead to wars, genocides, and other tyrannical practices, expresses an innocence we can no longer afford to indulge"

"The State…has had a vested interest in promoting attitudes that would tend to make us skeptical of our own abilities, fearful of the motives of others, and emotionally dependent upon external authorities for purpose and direction in our lives."

"Our lack of constant awareness has also permitted us to accept definitions of freedom that are not necessarily consistent with the actuality of being free. Because we have learned to confuse the word with the reality the word seeks to describe, our vocabulary has become riddled with distorted and contradictory meanings smuggled into the language."

All by Butler D. Shaffer

[tellyontellyon]

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

[rollo_tomassi]

Some good ones from Proudhon:


"Originally, all things were common and undivided; they were the property of all..." Let us go no further.


Would it not be criminal if some islanders were to repulse in the name of property, the unfortunate victims of a shipwreck trying to reach the shore?


By the right of increase the proprietor reaps but does not toil; gathers but does not plant; consumes but does not produce; enjoys, but does not labour

[ponyfang]

"Red for the blood, Red for the flag, Red for the people and Red for our freedom."
~~Ponyfang

[ponyfang]

Another one. Not so much as a quote as it is lyrics but if you look at it youll understand what i mean when posting this.

I sing the song of the colony
How many years and you're still not free
And your mother cries and you ask god why
Greed is the knife and the scars run deep
How many races with much reason to weep
And your children cry
And you ask god why

Annie, she came from Dunlavin Town
The TB came and killed her family all around
Population booms
Eleven in two rooms
Katie she came from down Townsend street
Ten in a bed and no shoes on their feet
1916 came
They played the patriots game
Freddy, he came from the Iveagh flats
Tenement slums and infested with rats
Sleeping on damp straw
Trying not to break the law
Thomas, he came from Kilmaine in Mayo
Semi starvation was the only life you'd know
In a two room shack
Then jailed in Letterfrack

I look to the east, I look to the west
To the north and the south, and I'm not too impressed
Time after time
After crime after crime
They raped, robbed, pillaged, enslaved and murdered
Jesus Christ was their god and they done it in his name
So he could take the blame if it's not all a game
With bible in one hand and a sword in the other
They came to purify my land of my Gaelic Irish mothers
And fathers, and sisters and brothers
With our own ancient customs, laws, music, art
Way of life and culture
Tribal in structure
We had a civilisation
When they were still neanderthal nations
We suffer with the Native American, the Indian in Asia
Aboriginal Australia
The African people with their history so deep
And our children still weep and our lives are still cheap
You came from Germany, from France, from England
And from Spain
From Belgium and from Portugal
You all done much the same

You took what was not yours
Went against your own bible
You broke your own laws
Just to out do the rival
But did you ever apologize
For the hundreds and millions of lives
You destroyed and terrorised
Or have you never realized
Did you never feel shame
For what was done in your country's name
And find out who's to blame and why they were so inhumane
And still they teach you in your school
About those glorious days of rule
And how it's your destiny to be
Superior to me
But if you've any kind of mind
You'll see that all human kind
Are the children of this earth
And your hate for them will chew you up and spit you out

You'll never kill our will to be free, to be free
You'll never kill our will to be free, to be free
You'll never kill our will to be free, to be free
Inside our minds we hold, hold the key

~~~~ Damien Dempsey: Colony

[A Revolutionary Tool]

Masturbation is to sex as philosophy is to reality
-Marx.
It went something like that in the German Ideology.

[ZeroNowhere]

"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
-MLK, Jr.

"In the town by the sea it was the day of the poll, and the poet regarded it sadly when he woke and saw the light of it coming in at his window between two small curtains of gauze. And the day of the poll was beautifully bright; stray bird-songs came to the poet at the window; the air was crisp and wintry, but it was the blaze of sunlight that had deceived the birds. He heard the sound of the sea that the moon led up the shore, dragging the months away over the pebbles and shingles and piling them up with the years where the worn-out centuries lay; he saw the majestic downs stand facing mightily south-wards; saw the smoke of the town float up to their heavenly faces--column after column rose calmly into the morning as house by house was waked by peering shafts of the sunlight and lit its fires for the day; column by column went up toward the serene downs' faces, and failed before they came there and hung all white over houses; and every one in the town was raving mad."
-Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (ie. The 18th Lord Dunsany), 'The Day of the Poll'.

[Liberateeducate]

But, If your heart really beats in unison with that of humanity, if like a true poet you have an ear for Life, then, gazing out upon this sea of sorrow whose tide sweeps up around you, face to face with these people dying of hunger, in the presence of these corpses piled up in these mines, and these mutilated bodies lying in heaps of barricades, in full view of this desperate battle which is being fought, amid the cries of pain from the conquered and the orgies of the victors, of heroism in conflict with cowardice, of noble determination face to face with contemptible cunning--you cannot remain neutral. You will come and take the side of the oppressed because you know that the beautiful, the sublime, the spirit of life itself are on the side of those who fight for light, for humanity, for justice. - Peter Kropotkin

[h9socialist]

"All in all, I'd rather be in Pittsburgh."

-- Keith Moon

[h9socialist]

"Hey, we can't really be dumb if we're just following God's orders. He wrote this book here, and it says in the book that he made us all to be just like Him! So if we're dumb, then GOD IS DUMB! And maybe even a little ugly on the side!"

-- Frank Zappa

[ZeroNowhere]

But, If your heart really beats in unison with that of humanity, if like a true poet you have an ear for Life, then, gazing out upon this sea of sorrow whose tide sweeps up around you, face to face with these people dying of hunger, in the presence of these corpses piled up in these mines, and these mutilated bodies lying in heaps of barricades, in full view of this desperate battle which is being fought, amid the cries of pain from the conquered and the orgies of the victors, of heroism in conflict with cowardice, of noble determination face to face with contemptible cunning--you cannot remain neutral. You will come and take the side of the oppressed because you know that the beautiful, the sublime, the spirit of life itself are on the side of those who fight for light, for humanity, for justice. - Peter Kropotkin
Why does this quote seem suspicious?

[Communist]

"It is not a war between the nations. It is a war between the classes." - Sam Marcy

"I was feeling like the other three were real tight and I was being left out. I went and knocked on Paul's door and he said 'I thought it was you three!' I went to see George, he said 'I thought it was you three!' So I went on vacation." - Ringo Starr

"I would never belong to a club that would have me as a member." - Groucho Marx

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." - John Lennon

"We're Communists. And as Communists our priority is to never, at any point or for any reason, criticize President Obama and to always support the Democratic Party. And stop talking about socialism ffs." - Sam Webb, CPUSA (paraphrased)

[h9socialist]

"Real revolutionaries are driven by great feelings of love."

-- Che

[F9]

I wonder how i never posted it in here.

"Football is not just a simple game, its a weapon of the revolution" -Che
:cool:

[ReVoLuTiOnArY-BrOtHeR]

"An unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates

[Rousedruminations]

Hélder Câmara

" When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist."

Karl Marx

"Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!"

Che Guevara


“Struggles of masses and ideas. An epic that will be carried forward by our peoples, mistreated and scorned by imperialism; our people, unreckoned with until today, who are now beginning to shake off their slumber. Imperialism considered us a weak and submissive flock; and now it begins to be terrified of that flock..

Mao Zedong

"We must have faith in the masses and we must have faith in the Party. These are two cardinal principles. If we doubt these principles, we shall accomplish nothing."

Leon Trotsky

"You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on -- into the dustbin of history!"

Mahatma Gandhi

"The devotion of such titans of spirit as Lenin to an Ideal must bear fruit. The nobility of his selflessness will be an example through centuries to come, and his Ideal will reach perfection."

V. Lenin

"Democracy is indispensable to socialism."

[HASTALAVICTORIASIEMPRE]

Stalin is probably the socialist bogey man. Even people who purport to be socialist or communist shy away from supporting him in the slightest (although being fair I don't think anyone with any sense would actually credit Stalins Russia as a socialist regime) so yes you are probably right I'd say all of those quotes were probably altered in someway or entirely fabricated.

Fabricated by people who feel the need to seperate themselves from Stalin.

[Soviet]

"Cries of the notorious bureaucracy are just a cover
dissatisfaction with the personal composition of the centers, a fig leaf, brightens
violation of words solemnly given to the Congress. You're a bureaucrat, because you
appointed by the Congress not by my will, but in spite of it, you're a formalist, because
that you rely on the formal decision of the Congress, and not on my consent, you are
acting in a grossly mechanical way because refers to "mechanical" most
Congress and pay no heed to my desire to be co-opted; you are autocrat!" (V.I. Lenin).

[The Ghost of Revolutions]

Its called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe in it.

-George Carlin

[ZeroNowhere]

"I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity. Through the ministrations of radio and the phonograph, we are rapidly and quite properly learning to appreciate the elements of aesthetic narcissism -- and I use that word in its best sense -- and are awakening to the challenge that each man contemplatively create his own divinity."

-Glenn Gould.

[ZombieGrits]

"Big hugs from all of us."

- Che, in a letter to Castro from the Congo :laugh:

[Pretty Flaco]

"Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking."
-French graffiti from may 1968.

[Joe Payne]

"Know the sort of world you want. Know your enemy and remember this - we have to beat the fascists every time, they only have to beat us once. If they come into power, we are dead and buried. Literally."
- AFA member

"He who does not want to speak about capitalism should also be silent about fascism."
-Max Horkheimer

"Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!"
-Michail Bakunin

"But I must tell you, comrade Lenin, that your assertion that the anarchists don't understand 'the present' realistically, that they have no real connection with it and so forth, is fundamentally mistaken. The anarchist-communists in the Ukraine . . . the anarchist-communists, I say, have already given many proofs that they are firmly planted in 'the present.' The whole struggle of the revolutionary Ukrainian countryside against the Central Rada has been carried out under the ideological guidance of the anarchist-communists and also in part by the Socialist Revolutionaries . . . Your Bolsheviks have scarcely any presence in our villages. Where they have penetrated, their influence is minimal. Almost all the communes or peasant associations in the Ukraine were formed at the instigation of the anarchist-communists. The armed struggle of the working people against the counter-revolution in general and the Austro-German invasion in particular has been undertaken with the ideological and organic guidance of the anarchist-communists exclusively.
"Certainly it is not in your party's interest to give us credit for all this, but these are the facts and you can't dispute them. You know perfectly well, I assume, the effective force and the fighting capacity of the free, revolutionary forces of the Ukraine. It is not without reason that you have evoked the courage with which they have heroically defended the common revolutionary conquests. Among them, at least one half have fought under the anarchist banner. . .
"All this shows how mistaken you are, comrade Lenin, in alleging that we, the anarchist-communists, don't have our feet on the ground, that our attitude towards 'the present' is deplorable and that we are too fond of dreaming about the future. What I have said to you in the course of this interview cannot be questioned because it is the truth. The account which I have made to you contradicts the conclusions you expressed about us. Everyone can see we are firmly planted in 'the present,' that we are working and searching for the means to bring about the future we desire, and that we are in fact dealing very seriously with this problem."
-Nestor Machno

"Let’s be done with waiting, doubts, dreams of social peace, little compromises and naivety. All metaphorical rubbish supplied to us in the shops of capitalism. Let’s put aside the great analyses that explain everything down to the most minute detail. Huge volumes filled with common sense and fear. Let’s put aside democratic and bourgeois illusions of discussion and dialogue, debate and assembly and the enlightened capabilities of the Mafiosi bosses. Let’s put aside the wisdom that the bourgeois work ethic has dug into our hearts. Let’s put aside the centuries of Christianity that have educated us to sacrifice and obedience. Let’s put aside priests, bosses, revolutionary leaders, less revolutionary ones and those who aren’t revolutionary at all. Let’s put aside numbers, illusions of quantity, the laws of the market. Let us sit for a moment on the ruins of the history of the persecuted, and reflect. The world does not belong to us.
"If it has a master who is stupid enough to want it the way it is, let him have it. Let him count the ruins in the place of buildings, the graveyards in the place of cities, the mud in the place of rivers and the putrid sludge in the place of seas.
"The greatest conjuring trick in the world no longer enchants us.
"We are certain that communities of joy will emerge from our struggle here and now.
"And for the first time life will triumph over death."
-Alfredo M. Bonanno

[∞]

"yes. it was either Robertson or Robeson"-Bro.1 in his usual expertise:lol:

[Stephen Colbert]

"People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization"- Agnes Repplier


"... So instead of you asking me, you should ask someone who is not interested in politics and then your question would be well-founded, and you would have the right to say,"Why, damn it, are you [I]not interested?" -Michel Focault