Stalin: It is said that in some countries in the West Marxism has already been destroyed. It is said that it has been destroyed by the bourgeois-nationalist trend known as fascism. That, of course, is nonsense. Only people who are ignorant of history can talk like that. Marxism is the scientific expression of the fundamental interests of the working class. To destroy Marxism, the working class must be destroyed. But it is impossible to destroy the working class. More than 80 years have passed since Marxism came into the arena. During this time scores and hundreds of bourgeois governments have tried to destroy Marxism. And what has happened? Bourgeois governments have come and gone, but Marxism has remained. (Stormy applause.) Moreover, Marxism has achieved complete victory on one-sixth of the globe; moreover, it has achieved victory in the very country in which Marxism was considered to have been utterly destroyed. (Stormy applause.) It cannot be regarded as an accident that the country in which Marxism has achieved complete victory is now the only country in the world which knows no crises and unemployment, whereas in all other countries, including the fascist countries, crisis and unemployment have been reigning for four years now. No, comrades, that is no accident. (Prolonged applause.) https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3367
Lenin: Proletarian democracy suppresses the exploiters, the bourgeoisie—and is therefore not hypocritical, does not promise them freedom and democracy—and gives the working people genuine democracy. Only Soviet Russia has given the proletariat and the whole vast labouring majority of Bussia a freedom and democracy unprecedented, impossible and inconceivable in any bourgeois democratic republic, by, for example, taking the palaces and mansions away from the bourgeoisie (without which freedom of assembly is sheer hypocrisy), by taking the print-shops and stocks of paper away from the capitalists (without which freedom of the press for the nation’s labouring majority is a lie), and by replacing bourgeois parliamentarism by the democratic organisation of the Soviets, which are a thousand times nearer to the people and more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois parlaiment. And oi on. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3369
Lenin: Bourgeois democracy, which is invaluable in educating the proletariat and training it for the struggle, is always narrow, hypocritical, spurious and false; it always remains democracy for the rich and a swindle for the poor. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3370
Lenin: Kautsky has renounced Marxism by forgetting that every state is a machine for the suppression of one class by another, and that the most democratic bourgeois republic is a machine for the oppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3372
Lenin: The dictatorship of the proletariat, the proletarian state, which is a machine for the suppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat, is not a “form of governing”, but a state of a different type. Suppression is necessary because the bourgeoisie will always furiously resist being expropriated. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3373
Soong Ching-ling: History has proved that Women’s Liberation in China—women obtain equal status with men—began with the democratic revolution, but will be completed only in the socialist revolution. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3374
Michael Parenti: Litvinov went to the Western Powers and called for an alliance with England, the United States, and France against Nazi Germany; and that if the Germans attacked Czechoslovakia, they would all join in—or attacked Poland or attacked anybody—that all the powers would join in at—to fight Hitler and contain him. The Western Allies refused those overtures from the Soviet Union—not because they were appeasers—not because they were simple and naïve—quite the contrary—because they had a plan of their own, and that plan was Munich! And the plan was "we give Hitler Czechoslovakia, and he goes East!" And they were waiting for war, and that war was supposed to come, and it was going to be Nazi Germany finishing off Bolshevik Russia! Just as they had sent armies in against Russia just a few years—less than a decade before—so they now planned to do the same, and so they've done again and again! https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3379
Patrice Lumumba: I'm just imagining a world were pushed by collaboration for the betterment of the world instead of driven by competition for increasing profits. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3380
Xi Jinping: The success of scientific socialism in China is of great importance for Marxism, scientific socialism and socialism across the world. It is most fundamental for the CPC to hold high the great banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics so as to realize its historic mission in the new era. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3385
Rose Pastor Stokes: When Russia deposed its czar we heard from a great deal of handclapping from the world but what did you hear when the real revolution took place? Not commendation at least. Russia is the threat against industrial serfdom and I have no doubt that there is a gentlemen’s agreement to bleed her to death and then, the capitalistic gentlemen, of, shall we say, any countries, sit around the green table and parcel Russia and the rest of the world into economic spheres, which our workers must slave to maintain. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3386
Rose Pastor Stokes: Surely there is not a capitalist or a well-informed person in the world today who believes that this war is being fought to make the world safe for democracy. It is being fought to make the world safe for capital, so that those who control the industrial machinery of England, France, America, Germany, Russia and Italy can dispose of the overproduction of the workers of those countries in lands less highly organized or not organized at all. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3387
Rose Pastor Stokes: Don’t look at the one who has somehow chanced to survive but look down into the pit where the millions struggle weakly, and where millions have succumbed. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3389
Rose Pastor Stokes: For twenty-three years, Capitalist Society had done its worst to me. It gave me an underfed childhood, hemmed me in on all sides by the stone walls of No Opportunity, and, when I was hardly old enough to bear the burden, it began to turn my very heart’s blood into gold for others — sometimes for people I never saw and who never saw me. Whole seasons at a time worked me not only the long day but also far into the night, giving me in return semi-starvation, a starved body upon it, a few indecent rags, no schooling, frequently the hard floor for a bd, and the weight of an unnamable nightmare as each succeeding year added another moth to feed, then eliminated the father of those six little ones, in the unequal struggle for bread. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3390
Rose Pastor Stokes: My chief interest is not birth control, but Socialist propaganda, which aims to place land and industry within the reach of all the people upon terms of equal opportunity — which purposes to eliminate poverty and insecurity by eliminating the waste and robbery of Capitalism. But pending the day when the Socialists have sufficient control to effect these basic changes, there are lesser causes to meet immediate vital needs that I believe to be worth fighting for, and birth control is such a cause. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3391
Rose Pastor Stokes: Is it possible that according to the law of our economic autocracy to be poor is to be obscene and to have property is not to be obscene? Ah, but these propertyless agitators who are spreading this scientific knowledge among the poor and the propertyless must be suppressed. For it is the business of our greedy capitalist society to prevent the poor from regulating the size of their families. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3393
Rose Pastor Stokes: It is widely known — and discussed (although not in print) — that not among the least of those who have persecuted the poor law-breakers in this respect have rich law-breaking friends and do themselves break the law and benefit by the scientific knowledge they are instrumental in sending others to prison for disseminating. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3394
Rose Pastor Stokes: We have met here in protest against the law which operates to keep the knowledge of contraception from the mothers of the poor and blinks the fact that the comfortable classes obtain that knowledge from their highly-paid physicians and from one another. We demand that the law which is a dead letter for the rich also become a dead letter for the poor, and declare that we shall continue in ever-increasing numbers to honor this law by breaking it. The poor and they physicians of the (poor), and those who realize the immediate necessity of spreading contraceptive knowledge, will not continue to respect a law that is negatively responsible for so much misery among the masses of the people. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3395
Rose Pastor Stokes: I see no hope of functioning 100 percent in the interest of the common people except through the Socialist Party, and hereby apply for readmission to membership. I left the party because I considered dangerous the party’s attitude toward America’s participation in the war; but the crisis created by the St. Louis resolution is past, and the present immediate danger is an imperialistic peace which, I believe, only a unified and strengthened international Socialist movement can prevent. I thrill to think how rapidly the world would move forward if, for instance, the German Social Democracy were to unite — if the party of the right were to unite with the party of the left — and sweep the Hohenzollerns out of power, or if the several parties of the Social Revolution in Russia were to sink their differences and go to the heart of their common purpose; or if in Italy, France, and England there were but one unified expression of the Socialist movement; and because my heart cries out to them, “Comrades, unite!” I am brought to a keen realization of my own remissness. If I see and deplore the results of disruption and desire unity for my Comrades abroad, I must surely strive for unity here, where 90 percent of the American people, whose hearts beat warm as any in the world for humanity, need to stand as unitedly against their own and the world’s anti-humanitarian 10 percent, as the 90 percent of any other country. President Wilson’s last message; the British and French government’s failure to meet fully and in a spirit of frankness the democratic implications of it; the imprisonment in Germany of 300 of her left wing Socialists; the counterrevolutionary attempts in Russia, where an unseen hand not Russia’s seems to be playing fast and loose — these four significant events are among the foremost impelling me to rejoin the Socialist Party. I beg, dear Comrades, that you admit me again to your ranks. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3396
R. Palme Dutt: Demagogy, … , is the art of playing on the hopes and the fears, the emotions and the ignorance of the poor and the suffering for the benefit of the rich and the powerful. It is the meanest of the arts. This is the art of Fascism. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3398
Erasmus of Rotterdam: I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3402
