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/…
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/…
