Mikhail Gorbachev: I decided that I must destroy the whole apparatus of the CPSU and the USSR. Also, I must do this in all of the other socialist countries. My ideal is the path of social democracy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mikhail Gorbachev: I found friends that had the same thoughts as I in Yakovlev and Shevernadze, they all deserve to be thanked for the break-up of the USSR and the defeat of Communism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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Mikhail Gorbachev: I wanted to save the USSR, but only under social democracy rule. This I could not do. Yeltsin wanted power, he did not know anything about democracy or what I intended to do. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts. We say that this is deception, dupery, stultification of the workers and peasants in the interests of the landowners and capitalists. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Aesop: I will have nought to do with a man who can blow hot and cold with the same breath. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Aesop: In critical moments even the very powerful have need of the weakest. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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Karl Marx: History is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Lippmann: There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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Hugo Chávez: I take this opportunity to once again condemn, from the depth of my soul, the state of Israel. Damn you, state of Israel, terrorists and murderers! Long live the Palestinian people! wordsmith.social/protestation/…
William Z. Foster: Capitalism will not automatically collapse... It will prolong its existence by one means or another, even though hundreds of millions are impoversihed, until the workers by a supreme political act give it its deathblow. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Tony Benn: I don't think people realise how the establishment became established. They simply stole land and property from the poor, surrounded themselves with weak minded sycophants for protection, gave themselves titles and have been wielding power ever since. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
The Lumineers song, "Stubborn Love", has lyrics "It's better to feel pain than never to feel at all."
When I was young I would not have questioned that statement, I wanted to experience life with the most intensity possible even if it meant some pain along the way.
Now that I'm older, not so much.
Lu Xun: For do not all the successes of Stalin's Union of Soviet Socialist Republics show the pitifulness of Trotsky's exile, wanderings and failure which "forced" him in his old age to take money from the enemy? wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Albert Einstein: I was originally supposed to become an engineer but the thought of having to expend my creative energy on things that make practical everyday life even more refined, with a loathsome capital gain as the goal, was unbearable to me. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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George W. Bush: I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George W. Bush: See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: We do not think that the war can be ended by a simple ’refusal”, a refusal of individuals, groups or casual “crowds”. We are for the war being ended, as it will be, by a revolution in a number of countries, i.e., by the conquest of state power by a new class, not the capitalists, not the small proprietors (who are always half-dependent on the capitalists), but by the proletarians and semi-proletarians. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John F. Kennedy: The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings...Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe...no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of "clear and present danger," then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent...For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Ansel Adams: When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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Miguel de Unamuno: My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread; I'm selling yeast. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Nikola Tesla: All these years I have spent in the service of mankind brought me nothing but insults and humiliation. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Georgi Dimitrov: Ay, if we and the proletariat of the whole world firmly follow the path indicated by Lenin, the bourgeoisie will perish in spite of everything. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Georgi Dimitrov: Fascism promised the ruined and impoverished peasants to put an end to debt bondage, to abolish rent and even to expropriate the landed estates without compensation, in the interests of the landless and ruined peasants. But actually it is placing the laboring peasants in a state of unprecedented servitude to the trusts and the fascist state apparatus, and pushes to the utmost limit the exploitation of the great mass of the peasantry by the big landowners, the banks and the usurers. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Milton Friedman: Inflation is made in Washington, because only Washington can create money. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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Sylvia Pankhurst: I am going to fight capitalism even if it kills me. It is wrong that people like you should be comfortable and well fed while all around you people are starving. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Che Guevara: We are now in a position in which we are much more than simple instruments of one nation. We are now the hope of the unredeemed Americas. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Erich Honecker: Nearly 90 per cent of all sports teachers had been members of the Nazi party. They were out of the question for our new schools and had to be replaced by antifascist teachers. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
V. Adoratsky: There is yet another danger, namely, of falling, in company with the idealists (Hegel), under the influence of abstractions, of losing contact with concrete reality, of confining oneself to dialectic conceptions without connecting those conceptions with the development of the objective world, of not distinguishing categories from the material relationships of the objective world—in a word, the danger of straying onto the path of idealism and of forgetting the requirements of materialism. This danger is threatened by the Menshevistic idealism of the Deborin group, who conceal idealistic and anti-Marxian views under the guise of Marxian phraseology and the pretence of fighting for dialectic materialism. While the mechanist theory has no profound social roots in our midst, Menshevistic idealism is nevertheless a real and serious danger. Clothed in the garb of orthodox Marxism, it acts as a channel of bourgeois influences to the proletariat. Some of the distinguishing features characteristic of certain representatives of this tendency, and which in fact are common to the whole school of Menshevistic idealism are: the severance of theory from practice; the denial of the party nature of philosophy; professorial, contemplative “objectivism”; failure to appreciate Lenin as a materialist and dialectician; failure to appreciate Lenin’s contribution to the development of dialectic materialism; the disguise of non-Marxian and idealistic views by Marxian phraseology; priggish “scholarliness” which is totally unjustified because this ostensible “scholarliness” is not backed by any practical work or by a positive study of the subject. The idealistic revision of Marxism effected by the Menshevistic idealists is clearly illustrated by the fact that this tendency makes the materialist dialectics of Marx identical with the dialectics of Hegel. Hence, their revisionism is essentially of a Hegelian character. The founders of scientific socialism always emphasised the importance of studying the method of dialectic materialism. They even pointed out how this should be done, namely, by studying the history of philosophy, and in particular, Hegel. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Bhagat Singh: We require — to use the term so dear to Lenin — the ‘professional revolutionaries’. The whole-time workers who have no other ambitions or life-work except the revolution. The greater the number of such workers organized into a party, the greater the chances of your success. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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Roger A. Freeman: We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow (to go to college). wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: But they also see that the development of the proletariat in nearly all civilized countries has been violently suppressed, and that in this way the opponents of communism have been working toward a revolution with all their strength. If the oppressed proletariat is finally driven to revolution, then we communists will defend the interests of the proletarians with deeds as we now defend them with words. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Howard Zinn: The CIA in Vietnam, in a program called "Operation Phoenix," secretly, without trial, executed at least twenty thousand civilians in South Vietnam who were suspected of being members of the Communist underground. A pro-administration analyst wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs in January 1975: "Although the Phoenix program did undoubtedly kill or incarcerate many innocent civilians, it did also eliminate many members of the Communist infrastructure." wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Ho Chi Minh: Lenin was the first to realize and assess the full importance of drawing the colonial peoples into the revolutionary movement. He was the first to realize that without the participation of the colonial peoples, the socialist revolution could not come about. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Class-conscious workers stand for full unity among the workers of all nations in every educational, trade union, political, etc., workers’ organisation. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: In our times the proletariat alone upholds the real freedom of nations and the unity of workers of all nations. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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Aesop: We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Moissaye J. Olgin: Trotsky as an individual is only a representative of a certain social class. He is a petty-bourgeois intellectual. He started with opposition to the Revolution and the Communist Party, and he has finished with heading the counter-revolution. He hates discipline when applied to himself. But he loves discipline when he applies it to others. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Federico Garcia Lorca: I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eugene V. Debs: Wherever capitalism appears, in pursuit of its mission of exploitation, there will Socialism, fertilized by misery, watered by tears, and vitalized by agitation be also found, unfurling its class-struggle banner and proclaiming its mission of emancipation. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Tolstoy: Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Nathan Mayer Rothschild: The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Antonio Negri: Empire is emerging today as the center that supports the globalization of productive networks and casts its widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within its world order - and yet at the same time it deploys a powerful police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Antonio Negri: (The) fact of being within capital and sustaining capital is what defines the proletariat as a class. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Antonio Negri: The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude - as Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that survives only by sucking off the blood of the living. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Antonio Negri: If by free market one means a market that is autonomous and spontaneous, free from political controls, then there is no such thing as a free market at all. It is simply a myth. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Noam Chomsky: We should not underestimate the capacity of well-run propaganda systems to drive people to irrational, murderous, and suicidal behavior. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Orwell: All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Terence McKenna: Stay the fuck away from that tabloid bullshit, reality tv, the news channels feeding you fear and hatred, lulling your unique human consciousness into a materialistic slumber only useful for selfish gain and the aggrandization of the ego which is ultimately an illusion and which will never be satisfied no matter what you buy. This gratification is and will always be transcient, so don’t buy shit you don’t need, don’t hate people you don’t know, and most importantly, don’t spend your precious time on Earth consuming garbage styled as entertainment. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Pak Kil Song: Communism! This is just the youth of the world. It is a cradle bringing up the bright future of the country. We know this too clearly and so, die smiling like this. We know and love the future! wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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Salvador Allende: There are some men who do not die. Stalin is among them. Stalin was an example of creativity, humanism and an edifying example of peace and heroism! ... Everything he did, he did to serve the people. Our father Stalin is dead, but in remembering his example, our affection for him will make our arms grow strong towards building a great tomorrow, to secure a future in memory of his great example! wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Bernard Shaw: I am going to ask you to begin our study of Democracy by considering it first as a big balloon, filled with gas or hot air, and sent up so that you shall be kept looking up at the sky whilst other people are picking your pockets. When the balloon comes down to earth every five years or so you are invited to get into the basket if you can throw out one of the people who are sitting tightly in it; but as you can afford neither the time nor the money, and there are forty millions of you and hardly room for six hundred in the basket, the balloon goes up again with much the same lot in it and leaves you where you were before. I think you will admit that the balloon as an image of Democracy corresponds to the parliamentary facts. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Arthur Schopenhauer: What the herd hates most is the one who thinks differently; it is not so much the opinion itself, but the audacity of wanting to think for themselves, something that they do not know how to do. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Paulo Coelho: Enjoy your freedom. The sheep spend their lives fearing the wolf, and end up eaten by the Shepard. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michael Parenti: Sleeping in a doorway is oppression. Want to know what oppression is? Then sleep in the doorways of the land of the free and the home of the brave and you’ll know what oppression is. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mao Zedong: Communists must be ready at all times to stand up for the truth, because truth is in the interests of the people; Communists must be ready at all times to correct their mistakes, because mistakes are against the interests of the people. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Audre Lorde: I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Gustave Le Bon: The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Nicola Bombacci: Overcome the Nation without destroying it, we want it bigger, because we want a government of workers and farmers, socialist, without denying the Homeland, an incontestable and sacred right of every man and every group of men. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Fidel Castro: Marxism taught me what society was. I was like a blindfolded man in a forest, who doesn't even know where north or south is. If you don't eventually come to truly understand the history of the class struggle, or at least have a clear idea that society is divided between the rich and the poor, and that some people subjugate and exploit other people, you're lost in a forest, not knowing anything. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: Hitlers come and go, but the German people and the German state remain. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Elon Musk: The government is simply the biggest corporation, with the monopoly on violence. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: These strikes, at first skirmishes, sometimes result in weighty struggles; they decide nothing, it is true, but they are the strongest proof that the decisive battle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is approaching. They are the military school of the working-men in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided; they are the pronunciamentos of single branches of industry that these too have joined the labour movement. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Being a school of communism in general, the trade unions must, in particular, be a school for training the whole mass of workers, and eventually all working people, in the art of managing socialist industry (and gradually also agriculture). wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The trade unions were a tremendous step forward for the working class in the early days of capitalist development, inasmuch as they marked a transition from the workers’ disunity and helplessness to the rudiments of class organisation. When the revolutionary party of the proletariat, the highest form of proletarian class organisation, began to take shape (and the Party will not merit the name until it learns to weld the leaders into one indivisible whole with the class and the masses) the trade unions inevitably began to reveal certain reactionary features, a certain craft narrow-mindedness, a certain tendency to be non-political, a certain inertness, etc. However, the development of the proletariat did not, and could not, proceed anywhere in the world otherwise than through the trade unions, through reciprocal action between them and the party of the working class. The proletariat’s conquest of political power is a gigantic step forward for the proletariat as a class, and the Party must more than ever and in a new way, not only in the old, educate and guide the trade unions, at the same time bearing in mind that they are and will long remain an indispensable “school of communism” and a preparatory school that trains proletarians to exercise their dictatorship, an indispensable organisation of the workers for the gradual transfer of the management of the whole economic life of the country to the working class (and not to the separate trades), and later to all the working people. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Miriam Makeba: The conqueror writes history. They came, they conquered, and they wrote. Now you don’t expect people who came to invade us to write the truth about us. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: Gentlemen! Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: The political spinelessness of the opportunists is no mysterious growth. It springs from the irresistible striving to adapt oneself to the tastes of the bourgeoisie, a striving to please the "masters" and earn their praise. Such is the psychological basis of the opportunist tactics of adaptation. And so, to stand well with the "gentry," to please them, or at all events to avert their wrath over the murder of the Exarch, our Menshevik opportunists grovel like flunkeys before them and take upon themselves the function of police sleuths! Tactics of adaptation could not go further than that! wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Samora Machel: Personalities and fame pass; the revolution must remain. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Muammar Gaddafi: Obama wants to kill me, to take away the freedom of our country, to take away our free housing, our free medicine, our free education, our free food, and replace it with American style thievery, called "Capitalism". wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party. It is called dialectical materialism because its approach to the phenomena of nature, its method of studying and apprehending them, is dialectical, while its interpretation of the phenomena of nature, its conception of these phenomena, its theory, is materialistic. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Russell Jacoby: To Marx, Ricardo was the classic and best representative of bourgeois economics since he articulated the contradictions of bourgeois society without glossing them over. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Russell Jacoby: Civilization is a scar tissue from a past of violence and destruction. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Russell Jacoby: To fasten on the facts while forgetting the social content is to fall prey to a mystifying immediacy. In an antagonistic society, appearance and essence, immediacy and mediacy, diverge; things are not what they seem to be. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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Russell Jacoby: The concept of "human existence" suggests an abstract human condition; "class existence" indicts bad conditions. The former suggests a nonexistent egalitarianism, as if master and slave, owner and worker, bomber and bombed all participate in the same universal abstraction. ... The human condition for the rich is the inhuman one for the impoverished. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Russell Jacoby: Existentialism is bourgeois ideology in the hour of its defeat. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Russell Jacoby: The laws of social development are not identical with the laws in the natural sciences. The content of the social laws is not nature but second nature: coagulated history. They are manmade, but they also make men; they are dialectical, at once subject and object. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mao Zedong: Communism is at once a complete system of proletarian ideology and a new social system. It is different from any other ideological and social system, and is the most complete, progressive, revolutionary and rational system in human history. The ideological and social system of feudalism has a place only in the museum of history. The ideological and social system of capitalism has also become a museum piece in one part of the world (in the Soviet Union), while in other countries it resembles "a dying person who is sinking fast, like the sun setting beyond the western hills", and will soon be relegated to the museum. The communist ideological and social system alone is full of youth and vitality, sweeping the world with the momentum of an avalanche and the force of a thunderbolt. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Silvia Federici: The construction of a new patriarchal order, making of women the servants of the male work-force, was a major aspect of capitalist development. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Arthur Scargill: Over 2,000 of our members have been injured on picket lines. Two have been killed and one man is in intensive care with a fractured skull. Don’t talk to me about violence. wordsmith.social/protestation/…