Lenin: Once the relation of forces is changed, what other solution of the contradictions can be found under capitalism than that of force? wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Let the kept bourgeois press howl to the whole world about each mistake made by our revolution. We are not afraid of our mistakes. Men have not become saints because the revolution has begun. The toiling classes, oppressed and downtrodden for centuries and forced into the clutches of poverty, savagery and ignorance, cannot be expected to bring about a revolution flawlessly. And the cadaver of bourgeois society ... cannot be nailed in a casket and buried. Defeated capitalism is dying and rotting around us, polluting the air with germs and poisoning our lives, grasping the new, the fresh, the young and the live with thousands of threads and bonds of the old, the rotten, the dead. For every hundred mistakes of ours heralded to the world by the bourgeoisie and its lackeys ... there are 10,000 great and heroic deeds, the greater and the more heroic for their simplicity .. performed by men who are not used to (and who do not have the opportunity to) herald their achievements to the world. But even if the contrary were true-although I know this supposition to be incorrect-even if there were 10,000 mistakes for every 100 correct actions of ours, even in that case our revolution would be great and invincible, and so it will be in the eyes of world history, because for the first time not the minority, not only the rich, not only the educated, but the real masses, the vast majority of toilers are themselves building a new life, are deciding by their own experience the most difficult problems of Socialist organization. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Che Guevara: The Nazi hordes were beasts, just as the Americans are beasts today. Like the Belgian parachuters, like the French imperialists in Algeria. Because imperialism in its very essence is what transforms men into beasts. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mao Zedong: Do we want to win the support of the masses? Do we want them to devote their strength to the front? If so, we must be with them, arouse their enthusiasm and initiative, be concerned with their well-being, work earnestly and sincerely in their interests and solve all their problems of production and everyday life--the problems of salt, rice, housing, clothing, childbirth, etc. If we do so, the masses will surely support us and regard the revolution as their most glorious banner, as their very life. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Jane Fonda: I would think that if you understood what communism was, you would hope and pray on your knees that we would someday be communists. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Bible: Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Frida Kahlo: I am a self and a Communist. I have read the History of my country... I know their class struggles and their economic conflicts. I understand quite clearly the dialectical materialism of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse. I love them as pillars of the new Communist world. Since Trotsky came to Mexico I have understood his error. I was never a Trotskyist. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Bertolt Brecht: Colossal crises, recurring in cycles, similar to huge & blindly groping hands that grip & throttle commerce, Convulse in speechless rage companies, markets & homes. Immemorial hunger had plagued the world when granaries emptied: Now, nobody knows why, we’re hungry when they’re too full. Mothers find nothing in the bare pantry to fill the small mouths While sky-high mountains of grain rot behind walls. & while bales upon bales of cloth are warehoused, the ragged family, Overnight kicked out of its rented home, wanders freezing Through emptied city quarters. He who cursed exploiters Now cannot find exploiters. Ceaseless was his work, Ceaseless is now his search for work. But the gate is locked. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Xi Jinping: Some people believe that Marxist political economy is outdated and Capital is outdated. This conclusion is arbitrary and wrong. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The first task on the order of the day is the continued work of the socialist education, organisation, and unification of the politically-conscious masses of the proletariat. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Adam Smith: Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part, can never be regarded as any inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Love for the people is permitted the lackey only to a very modest degree, of course, and only on the imperative condition that he expresses humble and servile feelings in addition to his readiness to comfort the working and exploited people. Let it be said in parenthesis that Feuerbach gave a very neat answer to those who defended religion as a source of comfort for people; to comfort the slave, he said, is to the advantage of the slave-owner, while the real friend of the slaves teaches them indignation and revolt, teaches them to cast off the yoke and does not comfort them. The lackey paints and prettifies the artificial flowers that serve to comfort the slaves who are fettered by wage-slavery. Champions of the emancipation of people from wage-slavery tear away the artificial flowers from the fetters they decorate so that the slave can learn to hate his fetters more consciously and more strongly, the quicker to throw them off and reach out his hand for living flowers. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: Marxism and anarchism are based upon entirely different principles, irrespective of the fact that they both enter the arena of struggle under a socialist flag. The cornerstone of anarchism is the individual, whose emancipation, according to it, is the main prerequisite for the emancipation of the mass, i.e., according to anarchism the emancipation of the mass is impossible until the individual is free; hence its slogan: "Everything for the individual." The cornerstone of Marxism, on the contrary, is the mass, the emancipation of which, according to it, is the main prerequisite for the emancipation of the individual, i.e., according to Marxism, the emancipation of the individual is impossible without the emancipation of the mass. Hence its slogan, "Everything for the mass." wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Edward Luttwak: A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Rousseau: There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom, for in that way one captures volition itself. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Herbert Schiller: The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Aldous Huxley: Hitler's vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Montesquieu: The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
William H. Hastie: Democracy is a process, not a static condition. It is becoming rather than being. It can easily be lost, but is never fully won. Its essence is eternal struggle. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
The American Heritage Dictionary: Establishment: An exclusive group of powerful people who rule a government or society by means of private agreements or decisions. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and extended the cognition of nature to include the cognition of human society. His historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops—how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Samuel Johnson: Power is always gradually stealing away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilant and consistent. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
