Stalin: The workers cannot trust their leaders when these leaders sink into the swamp of the diplomatic game, when their words are not supported by deeds, when the words and deeds of leaders do not coincide. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5122
Kwame Nkrumah: Race is inextricably linked with class exploitation. In a racist-capitalist power structure, capitalist exploitation and race oppression are complementary; the removal of one ensures the removal of the other. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5123
Karl Marx: The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistably tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen's gentlemen with pen and inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5124
Friedrich Engels: For it (dialectical philosophy), nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain. It has, of course, also a conservative side; it recognizes that definite stages of knowledge and society are justified for their time and circumstances; but only so far. The conservatism of this mode of outlook is relative; its revolutionary character is absolute — the only absolute dialectical philosophy admits. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5125
Lenin: But despite all its mistakes the Commune was a superb example of the great proletarian movement of the nineteenth century. Marx set a high value on the historic significance of the Commune—if, during the treacherous attempt by the Versailles gang to seize the arms of the Paris proletariat, the workers had allowed themselves to be disarmed without a fight, the disastrous effect of the demoralisation, that this weakness would have caused in the proletarian movement, would have been far, far greater than the losses suffered by the working class in the battle to defend its arms.(3) The sacrifices of the Commune, heavy as they were, are made up for by its significance for the general struggle of the proletariat: it stirred the socialist movement throughout Europe, it demonstrated the strength of civil war, it dispelled patriotic illusions, and destroyed the naïve belief in any efforts of the bourgeoisie for common national aims. The Commune taught the European proletariat to pose concretely the tasks of the socialist revolution. The lesson learnt by the proletariat will not be forgotten. The working class will make use of it, as it has already done in Russia during the December uprising. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5126
Hardial Bains: Religion (in Albania) has been officially banned as a result of the mass opposition which turned into a tremendous mass movement irresistibly demanding the expropriation of the churches and mosques — institutions used by the foreign invaders and internal reactionaries to exploit and suppress the masses of the people and to enslave the nation. We visited a museum on atheism which depicts the anti-scientific, anti-people and traitorous role of religion in the hands of imperialism, social-imperialism and all reaction. We also visited a sports arena converted from a big church expropriated at the demand of the young people in the latter part of the sixties. This sports arena also contains a gymnasium for young boys and girls who we saw carrying out gymnastic exercises. Religion has become a museum-piece in Albania. The Albanian people have won a great victory on this front as well. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5127
Leonardo da Vinci: The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5134
Leonardo da Vinci: Those who fall in love with practice without science are like a sailor who enters a ship without a helm or a compass, and who never can be certain whither he is going. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5140
Haile Selassie I: Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5151
Stalin: How do the Social-Democratic parties of the West exist and develop nowadays? Have they inner-party contradictions, disagreements based on principle? Of course, they have. Do they disclose these contradictions and try to over come them honestly and openly in sight of the mass of the party membership? No, of course not. It is the practice of the Social-Democrats to cover up and conceal these contradictions and disagreements. It is the practice of the Social-Democrats to turn their conferences and congresses into an empty parade of ostensible well-being, assiduously covering up and slurring over internal disagreements. But nothing can come of this except stuffing people's heads with rubbish and the ideological impoverishment of the party. This is one of the reasons for the decline of West-European Social-Democracy, which was once revolutionary, and is now reformist. We, however, cannot live and develop in that way, comrades. The policy of a "middle" line in matters of principle is not our policy. The policy of a "middle" line in matters of principle is the policy of decaying and degenerating parties. Such a policy cannot but lead to the conversion of the party into an empty bureaucratic apparatus, running idle and divorced from the masses of the workers. That path is not our path. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5153
Stalin: I think that the source of the contradictions within the proletarian parties lies in two circumstances. What are these circumstances? They are, firstly, the pressure exerted by the bourgeoisie and bourgeois ideology on the proletariat and its party in the conditions of the class struggle—a pressure to which the least stable strata of the proletariat, and, hence, the least stable strata of the proletarian party, not infrequently succumb. It must not be thought that the proletariat is completely isolated from society, that it stands outside society. The proletariat is a part of society, connected with its diverse strata by numerous threads. But the party is a part of the proletariat. Hence the Party cannot be exempt from connections with, and from the influence of, the diverse sections of bourgeois society. The pressure of the bourgeoisie and its ideology on the proletariat and its party finds expression in the fact that bourgeois ideas, manners, customs and sentiments not infrequently penetrate the proletariat and its party through definite strata of the proletariat that are in one way or another connected with bourgeois society. They are, secondly, the heterogeneity of the working class, the existence of different strata within the working class. I think that the proletariat, as a class, can be divided into three strata. One stratum is the main mass of the proletariat, its core, its permanent part, the mass of "pure-blooded" proletarians, who have long broken off connection with the capitalist class. This stratum of the proletariat is the most reliable bulwark of Marxism. The second stratum consists of newcomers from non-proletarian classes—from the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie or the intelligentsia. These are former members of other classes who have only recently merged with the proletariat and have brought with them into the working class their customs, their habits, their waverings and their vacillations. This stratum constitutes the most favourable soil for all sorts of anarchist, semi-anarchist and "ultra-Left" groups. The third stratum, lastly, consists of the labour aristocracy, the upper stratum of the working class, the most well-to-do portion of the proletariat, with its propensity for compromise with the bourgeoisie, its predominant inclination to adapt itself to the powers that be, and its anxiety to "get on in life." This stratum constitutes the most favourable soil for outright reformists and opportunists. Notwithstanding their superficial difference, these last two strata of the working class constitute a more or less common nutritive medium for opportunism in general—open opportunism, when the sentiments of the labour aristocracy gain the upper hand, and opportunism camouflaged with "Left" phrases, when the sentiments of the semi-middle-class strata of the working class which have not yet completely broken with the petty-bourgeois environment gain the upper hand. The fact that "ultra-Left" sentiments very often coincide with the sentiments of open opportunism is not at all surprising. Lenin said time and again that the "ultra-Left" opposition is the reverse side of the Right-wing, Menshevik, openly opportunist opposition. And that is quite true. If the "ultra-Lefts" stand for revolution only because they expect the victory of the revolution the very next day, then obviously they must fall into despair and be disillusioned in the revolution if the revolution is delayed, if the revolution is not victorious the very next day. Naturally, with every turn in the development of the class struggle, with every sharpening of the struggle and intensification of difficulties, the differences in the views, customs and sentiments of the various strata of the proletariat must inevitably make themselves felt in the shape of definite disagreements within the party, and the pressure of the bourgeoisie and its ideology must inevitably accentuate these disagreements by providing them with an outlet in the form of a struggle within the proletarian party. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5154
