Friedrich Engels: ELECTRICITY, like heat, only in a different way, has also a certain omnipresent character. Hardly any change can occur in the world without it being possible to demonstrate the presence of electrical phenomena. If water evaporates, if a flame burns, if two different metals, or two metals of different temperature, touch, or if iron touches a solution of copper sulphate, and so on, electrical processes take place simultaneously with the more apparent physical and chemical phenomena. The more exactly we investigate natural processes of the most diverse nature, the more do we find evidence of electricity. In spite of its omnipresence, in spite of the fact that for half a century electricity has become more and more pressed into the industrial service of mankind, it remains precisely that form of motion the nature of which is still enveloped in the greatest obscurity. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case. But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Fred Hampton: We understood that politics is nothing but war without bloodshed and war is nothing but politics with bloodshed. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: Notice the way in which the capitalists are trying to escape from the economic crisis. They are reducing the workers' wages as much as possible. They are reducing the prices of raw materials as much as possible. But they do not want to reduce the prices of food and industrial commodities for mass consumption to any important extent. This means that they want to escape from the crisis at the expense of the principal consumers, at the expense of the workers and peasants, at the expense of the working people. The capitalists are cutting the ground from under their own feet. And instead of overcoming the crisis they are aggravating it; new conditions are accumulating which lead to a new, even more severe crisis. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis: And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Bertolt Brecht: Comrades, do get it into your heads, this ‘lesser evil’ which Year after year has been used to keep you completely out of the fight Will very soon mean having to stomach the Nazis. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Kwame Nkrumah: A non-racial society can only be achieved by socialist revolutionary action of the masses. It will never come as a gift from the minority ruling class. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: Philanthropic institutions forsooth! As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practising your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them! Charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes; charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Tom Clancy: The control of information is something the elite always do, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: We have made the start. When, at what date and time, and the proletarians of which nation will complete this process is not important. The important thing is that the ice has been broken; the road is open, the way has been shown. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Fidel Castro: We should not underrate the enemy. Imperialism is still strong although its strength will dwindle steadily from one day to another. It still commands vast economic, military and scientific-technical resources, and-this should be particularly noted-has rich experience in resorting to lies, falsification and deception to confuse the masses. Besides, serving its interests are, of course, pseudo-revolutionaries and renegades who in fact act as splitters trying to hinder and paralyze the development of the revolutionary movement, although they often hypocritically use ultra-radical phraseology. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: All the social functions of the capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Sun Tzu: All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michael Parenti: U.S. leaders have been dedicated above all to making the world safe for global corporate investment and the private profit system. Pursuant of this goal, they have used fascism to protect capitalism, while claiming to be saving democracy from communism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michael Parenti: The overthrow of communism gave a green light to the unbridled exploitative impulses of Western corporate interests. No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, and no longer constrained by a competing system, the corporate class is rolling back the many gains that working people in the West have won over the years. Now that the free market, in its meanest form, is emerging triumphant in the East, so will it prevail in the West. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michael Parenti: So it is the heart of us policy, ladies and gentlemen, to use fascism to preserve capitalism while claiming to be saving democracy from communism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michael Parenti: Once you frighten the American public, once you demonize the leaders of these countries, then you have license to bomb their people and bomb their infrastructure and destroy their countries. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: We say nothing of the fact that bourgeois society is continually producing politicians who love to assert they belong to no class, and opportunists who love to call themselves socialists, both of whom deliberately and systematically deceive the masses with the most florid and "radical" words. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eduardo Galeano: They came. They had the Bible and we had the land. And they said to us, "Close your eyes and pray". And when we opened our eyes, they had the earth and we had the Bible. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Rolf Hochhuth: When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: Under capitalism there are no real "liberties" for the exploited, nor can there be, if for no reason than that the premises, printing plants, paper supplies, etc, indispensable for the enjoyment of "liberties" are the privilege of the exploiters. Under capitalism the exploited masses do not, nor can they ever, really participate in governing the country, if for no other reason than that, even under the most democratic regime, under conditions of capitalism, governments are not set up by the people but by the Rothschilds and Stinneses, the Rockefellers and Morgans. Democracy under capitalism is capitalist democracy, the democracy of the exploiting minority, based on the restriction of the rights of exploited majority and directed against this majority. Only under the proletarian dictatorship are real liberties for the exploited and real participation of the proletarians and peasants in governing the country possible. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, democracy is proletarian democracy, the democracy of the exploited majority, based on the restriction of the rights of the exploiting minority and directed against this minority. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Soviet power has been trying to make it possible for the working people to organise their lives without private property in land, without privately-owned factories, without that private property that everywhere, throughout the world, even where there is complete political liberty, even in the most democratic republics, keeps the working people in a state of what is actually poverty and wage-slavery, and women in a state of double slavery. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The blockade by the imperialist beasts is in full swing; the violence of the biggest world powers is turned against us in the hope of restoring the rule of the exploiters. And all this bestial fury of the Russian and world capitalists is cloaked, needless to say, in phrases about the lofty significance of "democracy"! wordsmith.social/protestation/…
