Madeleine L'Engle: The first people a dictator puts in jail after a coup are the writers, the teachers, the librarians — because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: But what is the result to-day under capitalism? The result is world crisis, stagnation and closing down of production, mass unemployment, mass impoverishment, lowering of standards. Why? Because capitalist monopoly cannot organise production for use; because the growing discord between ever-greater capitalist accumulation of wealth on one side and growing mass impoverishment on the other, makes impossible the use of more than a diminishing proportion of the rising productive power. Every advance of production only intensifies the crisis, intensifies the ferocity of capitalist competition for the market. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Assata Shakur: When times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as long as they can maintain their own privileges. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Otto Kuusinen: Could we avoid an armed conflict? No! It was only postponed to a time when the bourgeoisie would be better prepared for it... wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Malcolm X: The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you’ll get action. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Who are capitalists explain briefly ? People who make a living by exploiting the productive energy of workers. People who make money without working while calling everyone else lazy. People who rob the general public in order to feed their sick hoarding instincts. (anonymous) wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: I said again in my speech that politics is a concentrated expression of economics, because I had earlier heard my “political” approach rebuked in a manner which is inconsistent and inadmissible for a Marxist. Politics must take precedence over economics. To argue otherwise is to forget the ABC of Marxism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Otto Kuusinen: Never in the history of class society has the ruling class believed in the inevitable doom of its system. The slave-owners felt sure their system would last for ever, for had it not been established by divine will? The feudal lords who superseded them likewise believed their system had been established by divine will and for all time. But they were forced to give way to the bourgeoisie, and then it was its turn to seek comfort in the illusion that capitalism was "eternal" and "unassailable." And many learned sociologists and historians, reluctant to break with capitalism, try in every possible way to refute the fact that the development and change of social systems follow intrinsic laws that do not depend on the will of the ruling classes and their ideologists. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Yasser Arafat: Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Nelson Mandela: Dialectical materialism seemed to offer both a searchlight illuminating the dark night of racial oppression and a tool that could be used to end it. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Adam McKay: Benito Mussolini created the word 'fascism.' He defined it as 'the merging of the state and the corporation.' He also said a more accurate word would be 'corporatism.' This was the definition in Webster's up until 1987 when a corporation bought Webster's and changed it to exclude any mention of corporations. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Rand Paul: Do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The U.S. government. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: We have only one maxim, one slogan: All who work have the right to enjoy the benefits of life. Idlers and parasites who suck the blood of the working people must be deprived of these benefits. And we proclaim: Everything for the workers, everything for the working people! wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Utopia is a Greek word, composed of ou, not, and topos, a place. It means a place which does not exist, a fantasy, invention or fairy-tale. In politics utopia is a wish that can never come true—neither now nor afterwards, a wish that is not based on social forces and is not supported by the growth and development of political, class forces. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michael Parenti: But if history teaches us anything it is that the power of the propertied class never stands alone. It wraps itself in the flag and claims a devotion to God, country, and the public good. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John F. Kennedy: For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Everything, not merely the land, but human labour, the human being himself, conscience, love, science—everything must inevitably be for sale as long as the power of capital lasts. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Martin Luther King, Jr.: Freedom only comes through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
James Connolly: Legislation does not control the Lords of Industry; it is the Lords of Industry who control legislation. As we have often put it: The Class which rules industrially will rule politically. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Anatole France: The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Charles Chaplin: The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Kim Il Sung: The U.S. imperialists are more afraid of the united strength of the revolutionary peoples of the world than of anything else. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
James Gilligan: Violent criminals are not violent because they are dumb, out of touch with reality, or unable to recognize hypocrisy, dishonesty, and injustice when they see it. They are violent precisely because they are aware of the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and injustice that surrounds them and of which they have been the victims. That does not mean that they respond to those conditions in a rational or just way, or that we should tolerate and permit their violence — which affects their fellow victims much more often than it does their oppressors. But it does mean that we cannot expect to stop the kind of violence that we call crime until we stop the kind of violence that I have called structural in "Structural Violence" (1999). By this I mean the deaths and disabilities that are caused by the economic structure of our society, its division into rich and poor. Structural violence is not only the main form of violence, in the sense that poverty kills far more people (almost all of them very poor) than all the behavioral violence put together, it is also the main cause of violent behavior. Eliminating structural violence means eliminating relative poverty. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Winona LaDuke: Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
