Lenin: One expression of the genius of Marx and Engels was that they despised pedantic playing with new words, erudite terms, and subtle “isms,” and said simply and plainly: there is a materialist line and an idealist line in philosophy, and between them there are various shades of agnosticism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Charles Emil Ruthenberg: The Bolsheviks are the grave-diggers of capitalism and the builder of the new world. They are... putting in place the foundation on which will be erected the structure of the new society — the better and more beautiful world of the future. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: The interests of the bourgeoisie demand the embellishment of capitalism and the concealment of the gulf that divides the classes. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
William Z. Foster: To outlaw and destroy the Communist Party is another imperative necessity for the capitalists in their attempt to break down working class opposition to their drive for imperialist mastery of the world. For these rulers understand very well, even if many workers and their friends do not, that the Communist Party is indeed the vanguard of the working class, the true party of the people. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Galeazzo Ciano: As always, victory will have a hundred fathers, but defeat will never be acknowledged by anyone at all. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Fidel Castro: If every worker and every peasant had had a rifle like that in their hands, there would never have been a fascist coup. That is the great lesson to be learned for revolutionaries from events in Chile. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Jamil Al-Amin: Those who understand the nature of the struggle, our job is to organize, not to be projected as leaders. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Mao Zedong: Today, two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party has long made up its mind to dig them up. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Nicholas Murray Butler: The world is divided into three kinds of people: A very small group that makes things happen; a somewhat larger group that watches things happen; and a great multitude that never knows what has happened. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Winston Churchill: Poland with the greed of a hyena took part in the robbery and destruction of the Czechoslovak state. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Stalin: Of course, in the United States of America, in Britain, as also in France, there are aggressive forces thirsting for a new war. They need war to obtain super-profits, to plunder other countries. These are the billionaires and millionaires who regard war as an item of income which gives colossal profits. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Leo Strauss: Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic: it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli's teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Leo Strauss: Democracy, in a word, is meant to be an aristocracy which has broadened into a universal aristocracy. … There exists a whole science—the science which I among thousands of others profess to teach, political science—which so to speak has no other theme than the contrast between the original conception of democracy, or what one may call the ideal of democracy, and democracy as it is. … Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness—voilà the epistemological roots of idealism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Raul Castro: In Cuba we have one party, but in the U.S. there is very little difference. Both parties are an expression of the ruling class. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
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/…
