Lenin: Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Today literature, even that published "legally", can be nine-tenths party literature. It must become party literature In contradistinction to bourgeois customs, to the profit-making, commercialised bourgeois press, to bourgeois literary careerism and individualism, "aristocratic anarchism" and drive for profit, the socialist proletariat must put forward the principle of party literature, must develop this principle and put it into practice as fully and completely as possible. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Leo Strauss: It is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself as fully as what it is. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Unless the revolutionary section of the proletariat is thoroughly prepared in every way for the expulsion and suppression of opportunism it is useless even thinking about the dictatorship of the proletariat. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Elizabeth Rowley: What socialism means is that the working people are in the driver’s seat. They’re the ones who make the decisions of what Canada would look like. We want to see fundamental changes that will enable working people to make those decisions. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: For revolution is one continuous and moreover desperate struggle, and the proletariat is the vanguard class of all the oppressed, the focus and centre of all the aspirations of all the oppressed for their emancipation! Naturally, therefore, the Soviets, as the organ of the struggle of the oppressed people, reflected and expressed the moods and changes of opinions of these people ever so much more quickly, fully, and faithfully than any other institution (that, incidentally, is one of the reasons why Soviet democracy is the highest type of democracy). wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey: When we break the law, we go to jail. When the government breaks the law, the government changes the law. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: The war of the Southern Confederacy is... not a war of defense, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Daniel De Leon: Capitalism attacks and destroys all the finer sentiments of the human heart; it ruthlessly sweeps away old traditions and ideas opposed to its progress, and it exploits and corrupts those things once held sacred. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Maurice Bishop: It took several hundred years for feudalism to be finally wiped out and capitalism to emerge as the new dominant mode of production and it will take several hundred years for capitalism to be finally wiped out before socialism becomes the new dominant mode. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Erich Honecker: I reminded them (young German communists) of the sacrifices made by the antifascist resistance and exhorted them to ensure that these heroes should not have died in vain. Their fight and their work should not only be an example to us but also a great lesson. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Leo Strauss: In order to learn to control the ordinary pleasures and pains, the citizens must be exposed from their childhood to the pleasures afforded by poetry and the other imitative arts which in turn must be controlled by good or wise laws, by laws which therefore ought never to be changed; the desire for innovation so natural to poetry and the other imitative arts must be suppressed as much as possible; the means for achieving this is the consecration of the correct after it has come to light. The perfect legislator will persuade or compel the poets to teach that justice goes with pleasure and injustice with pain. The perfect legislator will demand that this manifestly salutary doctrine be taught even if it were not true. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Leo Strauss: Strange as it may sound, in this part of the argument it appears to be easier to persuade the multitude to accept the rule of the philosophers than to persuade the philosophers to rule the multitude: the philosophers cannot be persuaded, they can only be compelled to rule the cities. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Leo Strauss: The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Leo Strauss: Absolute tolerance is altogether impossible; the allegedly absolute tolerance turns into ferocious hatred of those who have stated clearly and most forcefully that there are unchangeable standards founded in the nature of man and the nature of things. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Ed Begley Jr.: I don't understand why when we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something by nature we call it progress. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: A higher concentration of dopamine appears to lower skepticism and result in greater vulnerability to pattern detection. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Robert Edward Lee: We only fight armed men. We cannot avenge the wrongs endured by our people without humiliating ourselves in the eyes of those whose disgust was caused by the atrocities of our enemies, and without offending God, to whom vengeance belongs. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: 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. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michael Parenti: There’s only one thing that the ruling circles throughout history have ever wanted-all the wealth, the treasures, and the profitable returns; all the choice lands and forests and game and herds and harvests and mineral deposits and precious metals of the earth; all the productive facilities and gainful inventiveness and technologies; all the control positions of the state and other major institutions; all public supports and subsidies, privileges and immunities; all the protections of the law and none of its constraints; all of the services and comforts and luxuries and advantages of civil society with none of the taxes and none of the costs. Every ruling class in history has wanted only this-all the rewards and none of the burdens. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Kim Jong-il: Defining the superiority of a nation according to biological or ethnic characteristics is the practice of reactionary, bourgeois ethnology. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Georgi Dimitrov: The Social-Democratic leaders glossed over and concealed from the masses the true class nature of fascism, and did not call them to the struggle against the increasingly reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: Marxism-Leninism is the science of the laws governing the development of nature and society, the science of the revolution of the oppressed and exploited masses, the science of the victory of Socialism in all countries, the science of building Communist society. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
