Lenin: The old society was based on the principle: rob or be robbed; work for others or make others work for you; be a slave-owner or a slave. Naturally, people brought up in such a society assimilate with their mother's milk, one might say, the psychology, the habit, the concept which says: you are either a slave-owner or a slave, or else, a small owner, a petty employee, a petty official, or an intellectual -- in short, a man who is concerned only with himself, and does not care a rap for anybody else. If I work this plot of land, I do not care a rap for anybody else; if others starve, all the better, I shall get the more for my grain. If I have a job as a doctor, engineer, teacher, or clerk, I do not care a rap for anybody else. If I toady to and please the powers that be, I may be able to keep my job, and even get on in life and become a bourgeois. A Communist cannot harbour such a psychology and such sentiments. When the workers and peasants proved that they were able, by their own efforts, to defend themselves and create a new society -- that was the beginning of the new and communist education, education in the struggle against the exploiters, education in alliance with the proletariat against the self-seekers and petty proprietors, against the psychology and habits which say: I seek my own profit and don't care a rap for anything else. That is the reply to the question of how the young and rising generation should learn communism. It can learn communism only by linking up every step in its studies, training and education with the continuous struggle the proletarians and the working people are waging against the old society of exploiters. When people tell us about morality, we say: to a Communist all morality lies in this united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters. We do not believe in an eternal morality, and we-expose the falseness of all the fables about morality. Morality serves the purpose of helping human society rise to a higher level and rid itself of the exploitation of labour. To achieve this we need that generation of young people who began to reach political maturity in the midst of a disciplined and desperate struggle against the bourgeoisie. In this struggle that generation is training genuine Communists; it must subordinate to this struggle, and link up with it, each step in its studies, education and training. The education of the communist youth must consist, not in giving them suave talks and moral precepts. This is not what education consists in. When people have seen the way in which their fathers and mothers lived under the yoke of the landowners and capitalists; when they have themselves experienced the sufferings of those who began the struggle against the exploiters; when they have seen the sacrifices made to keep what has been won, and seen what deadly enemies the landowners and capitalists are -- they are taught by these conditions to become Communists. Communist morality is based on the struggle for the consolidation and completion of communism. That is also the basis of communist training, education, and teaching. That is the reply to the question of how communism should be learnt. 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.
