Sun Tzu: If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9674
Gramsci: It is almost always the case that a 'spontaneous' movement of the subaltern classes is accompanied by a reactionary movement of the right-wing of the dominant class, for concomitant reasons. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9676
Malcolm X: You don't scare Negroes today with no badge or no white skin or no white sheet or no white anything else. The police the same way; they put their club upside your head and turn around and accuse you of attacking them. Every case of police brutality against a Negro follows the same pattern. They attack you, bust you all upside your mouth and then take you to court and charge you with assault. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9677
Michael Parenti: There is no such thing in America as an independent press. (…) You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid (…) for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with ―others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things― and any of you would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job (…) We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9678
Steve Kangas: The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (2) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an “American Holocaust.” The CIA justifies these actions as part of its war against communism. But most coups do not involve a communist threat. Unlucky nations are targeted for a wide variety of reasons: not only threats to American business interests abroad, but also liberal or even moderate social reforms, political instability, the unwillingness of a leader to carry out Washington’s dictates, and declarations of neutrality in the Cold War. Indeed, nothing has infuriated CIA Directors quite like a nation’s desire to stay out of the Cold War. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9680
Lenin: The intellectual forces of the workers and peasants are growing and getting stronger in their fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the educated classes, the lackeys of capital, who consider themselves the brains of the nation. In fact they are not its brains but its shit. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9681
James Connolly: The most interesting study for an intelligent worker to take up and make his own is, in our opinion, the study of the natural history of the ruling class. It is not only interesting in itself, but leads to and makes necessary excursions into all sorts of allied fields of study, so that once you have begun to take it up seriously you are led on almost unconsciously to a broadening of your field of vision, and a deepening of your insight into the heart of things. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9683
Errico Malatesta: Most assuredly the bourgeoisie has no right to complain of the violence of its foes, since its whole history, as a class, is a history of bloodshed, and since the system of exploitation, which is the law of its life, daily produces hecatombs of innocents. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9685
Eugene V. Debs: "Law and order" is a phrase mouthed by hypocrites to command the obedience of cowards. The capitalist class buys law, as it does labor, using the one to fleece the other, and what it means by "law and order" is cringing submission to slavery. "Law and order is the wand of the imposter, the mask of the robber. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9686
Stalin: It never has been and never will be the case that a dying class surrenders its positions voluntarily without attempting to organise resistance. It never has been and never will be the case that the working class could advance towards socialism in a class society without struggle or commotion. On the contrary, the advance towards socialism cannot but cause the exploiting elements to resist the advance, and the resistance of the exploiters cannot but lead to the inevitable sharpening of the class struggle. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9689
Gramsci: There is only one way: to succeed in reorganizing the great mass of workers during the very development of the bourgeois political crisis, and not by concession of the bourgeois, but through the initiative of a revolutionary minority and around the latter. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9690
Lenin: The capitalist newspapers, led by Rech, are falling over backwards in their attempt to scare the people with the spectre of "anarchy".Not a day passes without Rech screaming about anarchy, whipping up rumours and reports of casual and minor breaches of the law, and frightening the people with the spectre of a frightened bourgeoisie. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9691
Otto Kuusinen: The minds of the great mass of the workers are not independent from the economic and political circumstances of the capitalist environment. The working masses are tied up with this environment by a thousand invisible threads, which in the course of generations have spun veritable cobwebs of bourgeois illusions and prejudices in their heads, which hinder the dawn of proletarian class-consciousness and which will not be removed until the whole edifice of the capitalist system will collapse and shatter the old cobwebs in its fall. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9693
Lenin: The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of another in the endeavour to keep them disunited. Class-conscious workers, realising that the break-down of all the national barriers by capitalism is inevitable and progressive, are trying to help to enlighten and organise their fellow-workers from the backward countries. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9694
Lenin: Our task is to reveal the truth to the proletariat and the peasantry clearly, directly and with unsparing candour, to open their eyes to the significance of the coming storm, to help them to meet the enemy in organised fashion, with the calmness of men marching to death, like soldiers in the trenches facing the foe, and ready at the first shots to dash into the attack. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9695
Lenin: And we are all convinced that the emancipation of the workers can be effected only by the workers themselves; a socialist revolution is out of the question unless the masses become class conscious and organised, trained and educated in open class struggle against the entire bourgeoisie. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9696
Dear god can we stop with the false "this saying is actually longer", it's terrifying seeing constant historical revisionism even if it's something so minor...
We don't need to edit history to erase all the inconveniences of taking a quippy saying at face value, and this only encourages people to be awful around so very many very real social issues because the quippy line can be purposefully misread in some shitty way that's obviously incorrect... by pulling this constantly it just tells people they're in the right for their bad faith takes.
György Lukács: Social Democracy was the ideological exponent of a workers' aristocracy turned petty bourgeois. It had a definite interest in the imperialist exploitation of the whole world in the last phase of capitalism but sought to evade its inevitable fate: the World War. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9698
Kim Jong-il: The "human rights" advertised by the imperialists are privileges of the rich, privileges to do anything on the strength of money. The imperialists do not recognize the right of unemployed people to work, or the right of orphans or people without support to eat and survive, for instance, as human rights. As they do not grant working people elementary rights to existence and as they pursue anti-popular policies and policies of racial and national discrimination and colonialism, the imperialists have no right to speak about human rights. The imperialists are the most heinous enemy of human rights. They violate the people's right to Independence and interfere in the internal affairs of other countries on the pretext of "defending human rights". We will never tolerate any imperialist interference or arbitrariness aimed at infringing upon the sovereignty of our country and nation, which we will staunchly safeguard. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9699
Lenin: The long reign of political reaction in Europe, which has lasted almost uninterruptedly since the days of the Paris Commune, has too greatly accustomed us to the idea that action can proceed only "from below," has too greatly inured us to seeing only defensive struggles. We have now, undoubtedly, entered a new era: a period of political upheavals and revolutions has begun. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9700
Aldous Huxley: There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9701
