Fidel Castro: Capitalism means unequal exchange with the peoples of the Third World, exacerbation of individual selfishness and national chauvinism, the rule of irrationality and anarchy in investment and production, ruthless sacrifice of peoples to blind laws in the economy, the rule of the strongest, exploitation of man by man, every man for himself, every man for himself. Capitalism in the social order implies many other things: prostitution, drugs, gambling, begging, unemployment, abysmal inequalities among citizens, depletion of natural resources, poisoning of the atmosphere, seas, rivers, forests and, especially, plundering of underdeveloped nations by industrialized capitalist countries. In the past it meant colonialism and in the present it means the neocolonization of billions of human beings by more sophisticated economic and political methods, but also less costly, more effective and ruthless. Capitalism, its market economy, its values, its categories and its methods can never be the instruments to get socialism out of its present difficulties and to rectify the mistakes that could have been made. A good part of these difficulties arose not only from mistakes, but also from the rigorous blockade and isolation to which the socialist countries were subjected by imperialism and the great capitalist powers that monopolized almost all the wealth and the most advanced technologies in the world, product of the plundering of the colonies, the exploitation of their working class and the massive brain drain of countries that were in the process of developing. Devastating wars, costing millions of lives and the destruction of the vast majority of the accumulated means of production, were unleashed against the first socialist state. Like a phoenix, it had to rise more than once from the ashes and rendered such services to humanity as overthrowing fascism and decisively promoting the liberation movement of the still colonized countries. All of this they want to forget today. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Quotes
- Otto Kuusinen: As long as the working class wages only an economic struggle, the bourgeoisie does not see in that any great danger for itself; but when the working class organises politically, i.e., creates a political party which expresses its will as a class, the bourgeoisie begins seriously to fear for its rule. That is why reaction deals its main blows against the political party of the working class. At the same time, trying to undermine the party from within, capitalist propaganda endeavours to persuade the workers that they can do without their own party. One of the manifestations of bourgeois influence on the working class is the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist denial of the leading role of a political party.
- Democritus: Not from fear but from a sense of duty refrain from your sins.
- Democritus: Many who have not learned wisdom live wisely, and many who do the basest deeds can make most learned speeches.
- Democritus: Fools learn wisdom through misfortune.
- Democritus: Strength of body is nobility in beasts of burden, strength of character is nobility in men.
- Democritus: Neither art nor wisdom may be attained without learning.
- Democritus: It is better to correct your own faults than those of another.
- Democritus: Good means not (merely) not to do wrong, but rather not to desire to do wrong.
- Democritus: Fame and wealth without wisdom are unsafe possessions.
- Muammar Gaddafi: We will not surrender. We will defeat them by any means. We are ready for the fight, whether it will be a short or a long one. We will be victorious in the end. This assault is by a bunch of fascists who will end up in the dustbin of history.
- Democritus: By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.
- Democritus: We know nothing accurately in reality, but (only) as it changes according to the bodily condition, and the constitution of those things that flow upon (the body) and impinge upon it.
- Democritus: Medicine heals diseases of the body, wisdom frees the soul from passions.
- Democritus: Immoderate desire is the mark of a child, not a man.
- Democritus: Men have fashioned an image of Chance as an excuse for their own stupidity.
- Democritus: In a shared fish, there are no bones.
- Democritus: Education is an ornament for the prosperous, a refuge for the unfortunate.
- Democritus: The animal needing something knows how much it needs, the man does not.
- Democritus: Moderation multiplies pleasures, and increases pleasure.
- Democritus: If your desires are not great, a little will seem much to you; for small appetite makes poverty equivalent to wealth.
- Democritus: No power and no treasure can outweigh the extension of our knowledge.
- Democritus: In fact we do not know anything infallibly, but only that which changes according to the condition of our body and of the (influences) that reach and impinge upon it.
- Democritus: Of practical wisdom these are the three fruits: to deliberate well, to speak to the point, to do what is right.
- Democritus: 'Tis not in strength of body nor in gold that men find happiness, but in uprightness and in fulness of understanding.
- Democritus: He who does wrong is more unhappy than he who suffers wrong.
- Samuel P. Huntington: The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
- Marjori Palmer: One of the most morale-damaging aspects of the inflation was the "sack of Germany" that occurred at the height of the (1923) inflation. Anyone who possessed dollars or sterling was king in Germany. A few American dollars would allow a man to live like a millionaire. Foreigners swarmed into the country, buying up family treasures, estates, jewelry and art works at unbelievable low prices.
- Lionel Robbins: It was the most colossal thing of its kind in history: and next probably to the Great War itself, it must bear responsibility for many of the political and economic difficulties of our generation. It destroyed the wealth of the more solid elements of German society: and left behind a moral and economic disequilibrium, a breeding ground for the disasters which have followed. Hitler is the foster child of the inflation.
- Lenin: There is no trace of utopianism in Marx, in the sense that he made up or invented a 'new' society. No, he studied the birth of the new society out of the old, and the forms of transition from the latter to the former, as a natural-historical process. He examined the actual experience of a proletarian mass movement and tried to draw practical lessons from it.
- Che Guevara: Many will call me an adventurer - and that I am, only one of a different sort: one of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes.
- Democritus: The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.
- Bertolt Brecht: Lenin is enshrined In the large heart of the working class.
