English quotes 1

• Let nothing be called natural in an age of bloody confusion, ordered disorder, planned caprice, and dehumanized humanity, lest all things be held unalterable! (Bertolt Brecht)

• Capitalism is the ultimate corruption, that never quits until it is stamped out. (Glen Ford)

• It is ironic that some left intellectuals should deem class struggle to be largely irrelevant at the very time class power is becoming increasingly transparent, at the very time corporate concentration and profit accumulation is more rapacious than ever, and the tax system has become more regressive and oppressive, the upward transfer of income and wealth has accelerated, public sector assets are being privatized, corporate money exercises an increasing control over the political process, people at home and abroad are working harder for less, and throughout the world poverty is growing at a faster rate than overall population. (Michael Parenti)

• Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell. (Frank Borman)

• The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization. The time has come to regenerate society — we are on the eve of universal change. (Eugene V. Debs)

• A reform is a correction of abuses; a revolution is a transfer of power. (Edward Bulwer-Lytton)

• It is not guerrilla warfare which demoralises, but unorganised, irregular, non-party guerrilla acts. (Lenin)

• It is now easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. (Fredric Jameson)

• Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. (Lenin)

• 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. (Che Guevara)

• 1) Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our perceptions, outside of us, for it is beyond doubt that alizarin existed in coal tar yesterday and it is equally beyond doubt that yesterday we knew nothing of the existence of this alizarin and received no sensations from it. 2) There is definitely no difference in principle between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and there can be no such difference. The only difference is between what is known and what is not yet known. And philosophical inventions of specific boundaries between the one and the other, inventions to the effect that the thing-in-itself is “beyond” phenomena (Kant), or that we can and must fence ourselves off by some philosophical partition from the problem of a world which in one part or another is still unknown but which exists outside us (Hume)—all this is the sheerest nonsense, Schrulle, crotchet, invention. 3) In the theory of knowledge, as in every other branch of science, we must think dialectically, that is, we must not regard our knowledge as ready-made and unalterable, but must determine how knowledge emerges from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact knowledge becomes more complete and more exact. (Lenin)

• Stalin systematically gives credit for all progress made to Lenin, whereas the credit has been in very large measure his own. (Henri Barbusse)

• There is pow’r, there is pow’r\ In a band of workingmen.\ When they stand hand in hand,\ That’s a pow’r, that’s a pow’r\ That must rule in every land —\ One Industrial Union Grand. (Joe Hill)

• I hate the indifferent. I believe that life means taking sides. One who is really alive, can be nothing if not citizen and partisan. Indifference is lethargy: it is parasitism, not life. Therefore, I hate the indifferent. (Gramsci)

• Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country. (David Ben Gurion)

• The headlong stream is termed violent but the river bed hemming it in is termed violent by no one. (Bertolt Brecht)

• Everyone knows that Leninism was born, grew up and became strong in relentless struggle against opportunism of every brand, including Centrism in the West (Kautsky) and Centrism in our country (Trotsky, etc.). This cannot be denied even by the downright enemies of Bolshevism. (Stalin)

• In Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable. Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times the process may seem painfully slow. But I am certain we shall achieve our reforms in our own way and in our own time. Then they will endure. (Margaret Thatcher)

• The fundamental law of revolution, which has been confirmed by all revolutions and especially by all three Russian revolutions in the twentieth century, is as follows: for a revolution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realise the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. It is only when the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph. This truth can be expressed in other words: revolution is impossible without a nation-wide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters). It follows that, for a revolution to take place, it is essential, first, that a majority of the workers (or at least a majority of the class-conscious, thinking, and politically active workers) should fully realise that revolution is necessary, and that they should be prepared to die for it; second, that the ruling classes should be going through a governmental crisis, which draws even the most backward masses into politics (symptomatic of any genuine revolution is a rapid, tenfold and even hundredfold increase in the size of the working and oppressed masses—hitherto apathetic—who are capable of waging the political struggle), weakens the government, and makes it possible for the revolutionaries to rapidly overthrow it. (Lenin)

• When hopes and dreams are loose in the street, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. (Che Guevara)

• With rebellion, awareness is born. (Camus)

• To be free, the workers must have choice. To have choice, they must retain in their own hands the right to determine under what conditions they will work. (Samuel Gompers)

• I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. […] It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. (Thomas Jefferson)

• Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10, 000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I. (Muhammad Ali)

• It always seems impossible, until it is done. (Nelson Mandela)

• Every generation needs a revolution. (Thomas Jefferson)

• The desire to revolt against oppression is the highest desire there is. (Tupac Shakur)

• The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. (Rosa Luxemburg)

• Whoever finishes a revolution only halfway, digs his own grave. (Georg Buchner)

• If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter. (George Washington)

• The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. (John Milton Hay)

• I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves. (Che Guevara)

• In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end. (Alexis de Tocqueville)

• All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come: the revolution. (Victor Hugo)

• A great revolution in just one single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a society. (Daisaku Ikeda)

• Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

• Older rich men declare war. But it is the poor youth that must fight and die. (Herbert Hoover)

• How strangely will the tools of a tyrant pervert the plain meaning of words! (Samuel Adams)

• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. (George Santayana)

• We must expel Arabs and take their places. (David Ben Gurion)

• Salvation for a race, nation or class must come from within. (A. Philip Randolph)

• Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations — all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism. (Lenin)

• Who will govern the governors? There is only one force in the nation that can be depended upon to keep the government pure and the governors honest, and that is the people themselves. They alone, if well informed, are capable of preventing the corruption of power, and of restoring the nation to its rightful course if it should go astray. They alone are the safest depository of the ultimate powers of government. (Thomas Jefferson)

• We the People are the rightful masters of both congress and the courts — not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution. (Abraham Lincoln)

• The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent. (Gore Vidal)

• Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty. (Thomas Jefferson)

• The duty of youth is to challenge corruption. (Kurt Cobain)

• Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President. (Theodore Roosevelt)

• Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts. (Thomas Jefferson)

• To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace. (Cornelius Tacitus)

• This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector. (Plátōn)

• History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance. (James Madison)

• It has become a sarcastic proverb that a thing must be true if you saw it in a newspaper. That is the opinion intelligent people have of that lying vehicle in a nutshell. But the trouble is that the stupid people, who constitute the grand overwhelming majority of this and all other nations, do believe and are moulded and convinced by what they get out of a newspaper. And there is where is the harm lies. (Mark Twain)

• …everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious. (Arthur Young)

• Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit atrocities. (Voltaire)

• A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. (Aristotélēs)

• Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. (George Orwell)

• The indifference to the plight of others and the cult of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. (Chris Hedges)

• In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy. (Fran Lebowitz)

• Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself. (Henry A. Wallace)

• [American exceptionalism] is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant. (Zbigniew Brzezinski)

• The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan. (Henry A. Wallace)

• I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world. (Joe Biden)

• In a dictatorship, censorship is used; in a democracy, manipulation. (Ryszard Kapuściński)

• We created Al Qaeda (in order to fight the Soviet Union). (Hillary Clinton)

• The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs. (Thomas Jefferson)

• It is ironic that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support. (Michael Parenti)

• “Don’t you want to abolish state power?” Yes, we do, but not right now; we cannot do it yet. Why? Because imperialism still exists, because domestic reaction still exists, because classes still exist in our country. Our present task is to strengthen the people’s state apparatus — mainly the people’s army, the people’s police and the people’s courts — in order to consolidate national defence and protect the people’s interests. Given this condition, China can develop steadily, under the leadership of the working class and the Communist Party, from an agricultural into an industrial country and from a new-democratic into a socialist and communist society, can abolish classes and realize the Great Harmony. (Mao Zedong)

• In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. (Karl Marx)

• Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government. (Edward Bernays)

• A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy. (Alexis de Tocqueville)

• We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. (Elie Wiesel)

• The liquidation of fascism must be the liquidation of the bourgeoisie that created it. (Gramsci)

• They [Social-Democrats] are just as much traitors to socialism… They represent that top section of workers who have been bribed by the bourgeoisie… for in all the civilised, advanced countries the bourgeoisie rob—either by colonial oppression or by financially extracting ‘gain’ from formally independent weak countries—they rob a population many times larger than that of ‘their own’ country. This is the economic factor that enables the imperialist bourgeoisie to obtain superprofits, part of which is used to bribe the top section of the proletariat and convert it into a reformist, opportunist petty bourgeoisie that fears revolution. (Lenin)

• It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands. (Ariel Sharon)

• The German army is a machine, and machines can be broken! (Konstantin Rokossovsky)

• By exposing the fact that the opportunists and social-chauvinists are in reality betraying and selling the interests of the masses, that they are defending the temporary privileges of a minority of the workers, that they are the vehicles of bourgeois ideas and influences, that they are really allies and agents of the bourgeoisie, we teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices. (Lenin)

• The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies. (Bertolt Brecht)

• What we need to do is to use the methods the terrorists use in order to overcome [the IRA]. (James Prior)

• The richly nourished patriotism of war breeds divisions and antagonisms which are easily exploited afterwards by political, racial, religious, and cultural passions, but most of all by economic interests. (John A. Hobson)

• Trotsky, along with Khrushchev, belongs to the category of the great revisionists. (Che Guevara)

• This country was founded by a group of slave-owners who told us all men are created equal. Oh yeah, all men, except for Indians and niggers and women, right? I always like to use that authentic American language. (George Carlin)

• The theory that the struggle between Bolshevism and Menshevism is a struggle for influence over an immature proletariat is not a new one. We have been encountering it since 1905 in innumerable books, pamphlets, and articles in the liberal press. Martov and Trotsky are putting before the German comrades liberal views with a Marxist coating… (Lenin)

• There can be no greater error then in supposing that capital is increased by non-consumption. (David Ricardo)

• The war fought today by our people is not only against the terrorists, but also against those who sponsor terrorism. Terrorism is only an instrument used by those Western states which want to apply the same Nazi mentality which aims at dominating everyone else and turning states and nations into slaves, turning them into satellites and controlling everything they have, materially and morally. (Bashar al-Assad)

• Capital must protect itself in every way…Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd. (Civil Servants’ Year Book)

• When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist. (Hélder Câmara)

• The men who possess real power in this country have no intention of ending the cold war. (Albert Einstein)

• Israel controls the United States Senate. (James W. Fulbright)

• A slave is one who waits for someone else to free him. (Rosellen Brown)

• We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not…You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world. (Chaim Weizmann)

• Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave. (Frederick Douglass)

• Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds opinion is greater than he who enacts laws. (Abraham Lincoln)

• How dare Americans allow their government to cause such misery [in the world]. (Ramsey Clark)

• … so long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible … (Robert McChesney)

• If the business community and political elite want to go to war they find it easy to mobilize domestic consent. (Edward Herman)

• When the IMF and the World Bank force a country to cut wages, lay off workers, produce for export instead of their own people, and sell off public property to cronies for less than its value, that’s called “economic reform.” (Robert Naiman)

• Not a nut or bolt shall reach Chile under Allende. Once Allende comes to power we shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and all Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty… (Edward M. Korry)

• We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism and in the future, nuclear terrorism. (Robert Bowman)

• How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think. (Hitler)

• A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side. (Aristotélēs)

• American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating fact is that whenever the people get ready to change the government, they can change it. (Upton Sinclair)

• The growing difficulties of the capitalists in all countries, multiplied by their ever-sharpening international rivalries, are prompting them to seek a way out through Fascist and nationalist dictatorships in their respective countries. Nearly all the Fascist propaganda bodies which are preparing the way for Fascism in Great Britain are quite openly anti-Semitic. This is not merely blind imitation of Hitler. The Fascists and the capitalist class generally would pay dearly for the chance of setting the British workers against some fancied “alien intruder” and thus diverting attacks from themselves. Those who imagine that there are no backward jingo sentiments among the British workers, on which the Fascists can play, are only fooling themselves. All the more reason, then, for every class-conscious worker realising the nature of the capitalist trap that lies behind the stinking bait of anti-Jew propaganda. (R. F. Andrews)

• In the general course of human nature, a power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will. (Alexander Hamilton)

• African blood flows in our veins. Many of our ancestors came as slaves from Africa to this land. As slaves they struggled quite a great deal. They fought as members of the liberating army of Cuba. We’re brothers and sisters of the people of Africa and we are ready to fight in their behalf. (Fidel Castro)

• Like a tree that has sunk its roots deep in the earth, which does not fall no matter how fierce the storm may be, the party can remain firm in any circumstances only when it has sunk its roots deep in the broad masses. (Kim Jong-il)

• However great your consciousness may be, you cannot stand up against bullets with bare hands! (Stalin)

• The people of a nation are enslaved when, together, they are helpless to institute effective change, when the people serve the government more than the government serves them. (Gerry Spence)

• Despite the fact that only the Nazi included into the title of their party designation ‘National Socialist’, fascism generally presented itself as socialist. (Mark Neocleous)

• It is natural for a liberal to speak of “democracy” in general; but a Marxist will never forget to ask: “for what class?” (Lenin)

• There is no hope other than communism. (@kazahann)

• The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own. (Nathan Mayer Rothschild)

• 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! (Salvador Allende)

• 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“. (Muammar Gaddafi)

• By means of the banking system the distribution of capital as a special business, a social function, is taken out of the hands of the private capitalists and usurers. But at the same time, banking and credit thus become the most potent means of driving capitalist production beyond its own limits, and one of the most effective vehicles of crises and swindle. (Karl Marx)

• Prostitutes are the inevitable product of a society that places ultimate importance on money, possessions, and competition. (Jane Fonda)

• The capitalists have always use the term “freedom” to mean freedom for the rich to get richer and for the workers to starve to death. And capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion. (Lenin)

• Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait. (Tolstoy)

• War cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and Socialism is created. (Lenin)

• Any army which does not train to use all the weapons, all the means and methods of warfare that the enemy possesses, or may possess, is behaving in an unwise or even criminal manner. This applies to politics even more than it does to the art of war. (Lenin)

• When change threatens to rule, then the rules are changed. (Michael Parenti)

• If every worker and every peasant had had a rifle like that in their hands, there would never have been a fascist coup. That is the great lesson to be learned for revolutionaries from events in Chile. (Fidel Castro)

• The bourgeoisie turns everything into a commodity, hence also the writing of history. It is part of its being, of its condition for existence, to falsify all goods: it falsified the writing of history. And the best — paid historiography is that which is best falsified for the purposes of the bourgeoisie. (Friedrich Engels)

• The U.S. imperialists are more afraid of the united strength of the revolutionary peoples of the world than of anything else. (Kim Il Sung)

• All wars are inseparable from the political systems that engender them. The policy which a given state, a given class within that state, pursued for a long time before the war is inevitably continued by that same class during the war, the form of action alone being changed. (Lenin)

• Marx is the teacher of revolution for the proletariat and working people all over the world, as well as the main founder of Marxism, creator of Marxist parties, pathfinder for international communism and the greatest thinker of modern times. (Xi Jinping)

• They presented us to the world as a slave who is proud of their chains, which is an insult! (Rafael Cancel Miranda)

• It is impossible to finish off capitalism without having finished off social democracy in the working-class movement. (Stalin)

• They think that Marx and Lenin invented the science known as Marxism-Leninism. Marx and Lenin did not invent. They merely observed and recorded. That’s all they did. They’re no different to Newton. We call the laws of gravity Newton’s Laws. But Newton did not invent the laws of gravity. He merely observed and recorded. (Stokely Carmichael)

• You must remember that we persecute nobody for religion. We regard religion as an error and fight it with education. (Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin)

• The tactics of participating in the elections weaken the revolutionary spirit of the people, for the advocates of participation call upon the people to take part in police-controlled elections and not to resort to revolutionary action; they see salvation in ballot papers and not in action by the people. (Stalin)

• This position of the Trotskyists is the same which all newspapers and publicity agencies of Yankee imperialism adopted in relation to the cause of Comrade Ernesto Guevara. All the imperialist press of the United States, its news agencies, the Cuban counter-revolutionaries’ press, the bourgeois press throughout the continent and the rest of the world — in other words, this campaign of slanders and intrigues against revolutionary Cuba in connection with the case of Comrade Guevara — coincided with precision with all imperialist bourgeois sectors, all the slanderers and all the conspirators against the Cuban revolution, for there is no doubt that only reaction and imperialism is interested in discrediting the Cuban revolution and in destroying the confidence of the revolutionary movements in the Cuban revolution, in destroying the confidence of the Latin American peoples in the Cuban revolution, in destroying their faith. Therefore, they have not hesitated to use the dirtiest and most indecent weapons. (Fidel Castro)

• The base is the economic structure of society at the given stage of its development. The superstructure is the political, legal, religious, artistic, philosophical views of society and the political, legal and other institutions corresponding to them. Every base has its own corresponding superstructure. The base of the feudal system has its superstructure, its political, legal and other views, and the corresponding institutions; the capitalist base has its own superstructure, so has the socialist base. If the base changes or is eliminated, then, following this, its superstructure changes or is eliminated; if a new base arises, then, following this, a superstructure arises corresponding to it. (Stalin)

• There is and there can be no other way of testing the real might of a capitalist state than by war. War does not contradict the fundamentals of private property—on the contrary, it is a direct and inevitable outcome of those fundamentals. Under capitalism the smooth economic growth of individual enterprises or individual states is impossible. Under capitalism, there are no other means of restoring the periodically disturbed equilibrium than crises in industry and wars in politics. (Lenin)

• As a young man I had already noticed that no newspaper can ever faithfully tell how things happen. (George Orwell)

• Neofascism abolishes civil liberties in the name of national security and brands whole groups as traitors and enemies of the people. It is the militarized instrument used by the ruling elites to maintain control, divide and tear apart the society and further accelerate pillage and social inequality. The ruling ideology, no longer credible, is replaced with the jackboot. (Chris Hedges)

• Some say that it is impossible to acquire the great qualities of revolutionary geniuses like Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin and that it is impossible to raise our own qualities to the same level as theirs. But as long as Party members work hard and earnestly, never allow themselves to be isolated for one single moment from the day to day struggle of the people, and make serious efforts to study Marxist literature, learn from the experiences of other comrades and the masses of the people, and constantly strive to steel and cultivate themselves, they will be perfectly able to raise their qualities to the same level as that of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. (Nelson Mandela)

• The revolution of 1848 struck a deadly blow at all these vociferous, motley and ostentatious forms of pre-Marxian socialism. In all countries, the revolution revealed the various classes of society in action. The shooting of the workers by the republican bourgeoisie in Paris in the June days of 1848 finally revealed that the proletariat alone was socialist by nature. The liberal bourgeoisie dreaded the independence of this class a hundred times more than it did any kind of reaction. The craven liberals grovelled before reaction. The peasantry were content with the abolition of the survivals of feudalism and joined the supporters of order, wavering but occasionally between workers’ democracy and bourgeois liberalism. All doctrines of non-class socialism and non-class politics proved to be sheer nonsense. (Lenin)

• The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spreads inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths (and the bourgeois cattle believe and enlarge upon them) in one day than could have formerly been done in a century. (Karl Marx)

• Fascists are not human. A snake is more human. (Hugo Chávez)

• The white man supports Reverend Martin Luther King, subsidizes Reverend Martin Luther King, so that Reverend Martin Luther King can continue to teach the Negroes to be defenseless–that’s what you mean by nonviolent–be defenseless in the face of one of the most cruel beasts that has ever taken people into captivity–that’s this American white man, and they have proved it throughout the country by the police dogs and the police clubs. A hundred years ago they used to put on a white sheet and use a bloodhound against Negroes. Today they have taken off the white sheet and put on police uniforms and traded in the bloodhounds for police dogs, and they’re still doing the same thing. Just as Uncle Tom, back during slavery used to keep the Negroes from resisting the bloodhound or resisting the Ku Klux Klan by teaching them to love their enemies or pray for those who use them despitefully, today Martin Luther King is just a twentieth-century or modern Uncle Tom or religious Uncle Tom, who is doing the same thing today to keep Negroes defenseless in the face of attack that Uncle Tom did on the plantation to keep those Negroes defenseless in the face of the attack of the Klan in that day. (Malcolm X)

• Historically, revolutions are bloody. Oh, yes, they are. They haven’t never had a bloodless revolution, or a nonviolent revolution. That don’t happen even in Hollywood. You don’t have a revolution in which you love your enemy, and you don’t have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it. Revolutions overturn systems. Revolutions destroy systems. (Malcolm X)

• The chief endeavour of the bourgeoisie of all countries and of its reformist hangers-on is to kill in the working class faith in its own strength, faith in the possibility and inevitability of its victory, and thus to perpetuate capitalist slavery. For the bourgeoisie knows that if capitalism has not yet been overthrown and still continues to exist, it owes it not to its own merits, but to the fact that the proletariat has still not enough faith in the possibility of its victory. It cannot be said that the efforts of the bourgeoisie in this respect have been altogether unsuccessful. It must be confessed that the bourgeoisie and its agents among the working class have to some extent succeeded in poisoning the minds of the working class with the venom of doubt and scepticism. (Stalin)

• It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews there are kulaks, exploiters and capitalists, just as there are among the Russians, and among people of all nations. The capitalists strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races. Those who do not work are kept in power by the power and strength of capital. Rich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob and disunite the workers. (Lenin)

• None have more sincere concern and zeal than thieves to maintain the institution of private property, without which their profession would come to an end, and they would find themselves faced with the unpleasant alternative of having to work for their living. On the other hand, they cannot publicly proclaim the principles of thievery and gangsterism as the basis of their stand; for public purposes, they have to proclaim the most high moral principles, to maintain existing society “unspoiled” and to keep “the mind” of the worker “healthy.” (R. Palme Dutt)

• Principle of transposition. Load on the opponent the own errors or defects, responding the attack with the attack. If you can not deny the bad news, invent others that distract them. (Joseph Goebbels)

• This is the radical difference that distinguishes the psychology of the peasant, handicraftsman, intellectual, the petty bourgeois in general, from that of the proletarian. The petty bourgeois sees and feels that he is heading for ruin, that life is becoming more difficult, that the struggle for existence is ever more ruthless, and that his position and that of his family are becoming more and more hopeless. It is an indisputable fact, and the petty bourgeois protests against it. But how does he protest? He protests as the representative of a class that is hopelessly perishing, that despairs of its future, that is depressed and cowardly. There is nothing to be done … if only there were fewer children to suffer our torments and hard toil, our poverty and our humiliation—such is the cry of the petty bourgeois. The class-conscious worker is far from holding this point of view. He will not allow his consciousness to be dulled by such cries no matter how sincere and heartfelt they may be. Yes, we workers and the mass of small proprietors lead a life that is filled with unbearable oppression and suffering. Things are harder for our generation than they were for our fathers. But in one respect we are luckier than our fathers. We have begun to learn and are rapidly learning to fight—and to fight not as individuals, as the best of our fathers fought, not for the slogans of bourgeois speechifiers that are alien to us in spirit, but for our slogans, the slogans of our class. We are fighting better than our fathers did. Our children will fight better than we do, and they will be victorious. The working class is not perishing, it is growing, becoming stronger, gaining courage, consolidating itself, educating itself and becoming steeled in battle. We are pessimists as far as serfdom, capitalism and petty, production are concerned, but we are ardent optimists in what concerns the working-class movement and its aims. We are already laying the foundation of a new edifice and our children will complete its construction. That is the reason—the only reason—why we are unconditionally the enemies of neomalthusianism, suited only to unfeeling and egotistic petty-bourgeois couples, who whisper in scared voices: “God grant we manage somehow by our selves. So much the better if we have no children.” (Lenin)

• To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize. (Voltaire)

• As the Praetorian Guard, fighting wars for multinational interests while also paying for such adventures, our relative economic stability, domestic social and material infrastructure, and the freedom and liberties of the American people may all be forfeited. (John Stockwell)

• Lenin showed that imperialism is moribund capitalism, that imperialism is the eve of the Lenin on imperialism socialist revolution of the proletariat. In his work on the foundations of Leninism, Stalin points out that Marx and Engels lived and fought at a time when imperialism had not yet developed, in a period of the preparation of the proletariat for revolution, whereas Lenin’s revolutionary activity was effected within the period of developed imperialism, the period of the unfolding proletarian revolution. Leninism is the further development of Marxism under new conditions, under the conditions of the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolutions. It follows, therefore, that at this time one cannot be a Marxist without being a Leninist. It also follows that to deny the Leninist theory of imperialism is to break away entirely from Marxism. It is clear from this that any distortion or mistake in the theory of imperialism inevitably means a break with revolutionary Marxism-Leninism. (R. Palme Dutt)

• A Marxist bases himself on the class struggle, and not social peace. (Lenin)

• What are the Communists? Our capitalist Press and propaganda has for so many years built up a “Communist bogey” that for most non-political people a Communist is a mythical monstrosity. He is either just a man who is born lazy, or an agitator paid by foreign gold, who is remarkably successful in per- suading honest and intelligent workers to strike for no reason; he is in any case anti-social and unpatriotic. The real truth is very different; the Communists in every country have numbered in their ranks some of the most highly skilled and conscientious workers, scientists, teachers, and writers; they are on the whole well informed and read The Times and the Financial News assiduously! They spend a good part of their leisure in mastering the intricacies of Marxist phil- osophy, in studying and seeking to improve social conditions, and in Trade Union and political activities. They include people of wide general culture and lively intellect. And above all, they are international in their outlook, sympathy, and philosophy. All the gangsters and fools who were welcomed into the Nazi party are assiduously excluded from the Communist ranks. Their professional politicians live on limited salaries and must maintain a high standard of personal conduct; (this rule is particularly strict in the Soviet Union). For a practical example of the difference between a Communist and a Nazi, one may recall the superb con- trast of Dimitrov and Goering during the course of the Reichstag Fire Trial in 1933. (Denis Nowell Pritt)

• At the present time, the propaganda of peace unaccompanied by a call for revolutionary mass action can only sow illusions and demoralise the proletariat, for it makes the proletariat believe that the bourgeoisie is humane, and turns it into a plaything in the hands of the secret diplomacy of the belligerent countries. In particular, the idea of a so-called democratic peace being possible without a series of revolutions is profoundly erroneous. (Lenin)

• Capitalism is in favour of new techniques when they promise it the highest profit. Capitalism is against new techniques, and for resort to hand labour, when the new techniques do not promise the highest profit. (Stalin)

• If we abandon private property, then all these unnatural divisions disappear. The difference between interest and profit disappears; capital is nothing without labour, without movement. The significance of profit is reduced to the weight which capital carries in the determination of the costs of production, and profit thus remains inherent in capital, in the same way as capital itself reverts to its original unity with labour. (Friedrich Engels)

• Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social. It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions. Till then, on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be: “Combat or Death: bloody struggle or extinction. It is thus that the question is inexorably put.” (George Sand)

• You know, this terrible pain is only the kiss of Jesus – a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you. (Teresa of Calcutta)

• Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich. (Peter Ustinov)

• In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class. (Mao Zedong)

• Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy; Soviet power is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic. (Lenin)

• To be sure a very strong bourgeois women’s movement was already in existence in Russia. But my Marxist outlook pointed out to me with an illuminating clarity that women’s liberation could take place only as the result of the victory of a new social order and a different economic system. (Alexandra Kollontai)

• The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat. (Lenin)

• The Soviet system provides the maximum of democracy for the workers and peasants; at the same time, it marks a break with bourgeois democracy and the rise of a new, epoch-making type of democracy, namely, proletarian democracy, or the dictatorship of the proletariat. (Lenin)

• Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years. To interpret history from this viewpoint is historical materialism; standing in opposition to this viewpoint is historical idealism. (Mao Zedong)

• Anyone who doubts the inevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as a necessary stage of its victory over the bourgeoisie, facilitates the conditions for the victory of the latter; anyone who doubts or renounces the political party of the proletariat, is helping to weaken and disorganize the working class. (Lev Kamenev)

• War unleashes – at the same time as the reactionary forces of the capitalist world – the generating forces of social revolution which ferment in its depths. (Rosa Luxemburg)

• The law of violent proletarian revolution, the law of smashing of the bourgeois state machine as a preliminary condition for such a revolution, is an inevitable law of the revolutionary movement in the imperialist countries of the world. (Stalin)

• Therefore the liberation struggle of the proletarian woman cannot be similar to the struggle that the bourgeois woman wages against the male of her class. On the contrary, it must be a joint struggle with the male of her class against the entire class of capitalists. (Clara Zetkin)

• If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has. (John Maynard Keynes)

• Hell must be a pretty swell spot, because the guys that invented religion have sure been trying hard to keep everybody else out. (Al Capone)

• In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer. (Karl Marx)