Mao Zedong: We are the opposite of the political parties of the bourgeoisie. They are afraid to speak of the extinction of classes, state power and parties. We, on the contrary, declare openly that we are striving hard to create the very conditions which will bring about their extinction. The leadership of the Communist Party and the state power of the people's dictatorship are such conditions. Anyone who does not recognize this truth is no communist. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3302
Jose Luis Sampedro: The economic development – and I am an economist – that they call sustainable, is absolutely unsustainable; Environmentalists know this very well. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3303
Jose Luis Sampedro: Societies are living entities and, as such, they have a trajectory that ends up exhausting itself. I believe that capitalism is on its last days in its current form. It has evolved: it began with mercantile capitalism, continued with industrial capitalism, then came financial capitalism and now globalization. And globalization is insufficient to guarantee them what they want. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3307
Jose Luis Sampedro: The market is in the hands of the powerful. They say that the market is freedom, but I would like to know what freedom those who go without a cent have in the market. When we talk about freedom we must immediately ask ourselves: whose freedom? https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3309
Jose Luis Sampedro: Religious teaching creates dogmatic thinking, a dogma is established and can no longer be discussed, free thought ends. Without it there is neither citizenship nor democracy. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3310
Mao Zedong: When a man reaches old age, he will die; the same is true of a party. When classes disappear, all instruments of class struggle -- parties and the state machinery -- will lose their function, cease to be necessary, therefore gradually wither away and end their historical mission; and human society will move to a higher stage. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3312
Mao Zedong: The state apparatus, including the army, the police and the courts, is the instrument by which one class oppresses another. It is an instrument for the oppression of antagonistic classes, it is violence and not "benevolence". "You are not benevolent!" Quite so. We definitely do not apply a policy of benevolence to the reactionaries and towards the reactionary activities of the reactionary classes. Our policy of benevolence is applied only within the ranks of the people, not beyond them to the reactionaries or to the reactionary activities of reactionary classes. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3313
Jose Luis Sampedro: Governing by fear is very effective. If you threaten people that you are going to cut their throats, and then you don’t cut their throats, but you exploit them, hitch them to a car… They will think; Well, at least he hasn’t cut our throats. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3316
Kurt Cobain: If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us - leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3319
Eric Hoffer: Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3321
Mao Zedong: The exploiters and reactionaries are, under any circumstance, the minority while the exploited and revolutionaries are the majority. Therefore the dictatorship of the former is unjustifiable, whereas that of the latter is fully justifiable. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3325
Lenin: Take the fundamental laws of modern states, take their administration, take freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, or “equality of all citizens before the law,” and you will see at every turn evidence of the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy with which every honest and class-conscious worker is familiar. There is not a single state, however democratic, which has no loopholes or reservations in its constitution guaranteeing the bourgeoisie the possibility of dispatching troops against the workers, of proclaiming martial law, and so forth, in case of a “violation of public order,” and actually in case the exploited class “violates” its position of slavery and tries to behave in a non-slavish manner. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3327
Lenin: The ruling party in a bourgeois democracy extends the protection of the minority only to another bourgeois party, while the proletariat, on all serious, profound and fundamental issues, gets martial law or pogroms, instead of the “protection of the minority.” The more highly developed a democracy is, the more imminent are pogroms or civil war in connection with any profound political divergence which is dangerous to the bourgeoisie. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3328
Lenin: Social-chauvinism and opportunism are the same in their political essence; class collaboration, repudiation of the proletarian dictatorship, rejection of revolutionary action, obeisance to bourgeois legality, non-confidence in the proletariat, and confidence in the bourgeoisie. The political ideas are identical, and so is the political content of their tactics. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3329
Lenin: Social-chauvinism is a consummated opportunism. That is beyond doubt. The alliance with the bourgeoisie used to be ideological and secret. It is now public and unseemly. Social-chauvinism draws its strength from nowhere else but this alliance with the bourgeoisie and the General Staffs. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3330
Lenin: Genuine freedom and equality will be embodied in the system which the Communists are building, and in which there will be no opportunity for massing wealth at the expense of others, no objective opportunities for putting the press under the direct or indirect power of money, and no impediments in the way of any workingman (or groups of workingman, in any numbers) for enjoying and practicing equal rights in the use of public printing presses and public stocks of paper. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3333
Lenin: The workers know perfectly well, too, that even in the most democratic bourgeois republic “freedom of assembly” is a hollow phrase, for the rich have the best public and private buildings at their disposal, and enough leisure to assemble at meetings, which are protected by the bourgeois machine of power. The rural and urban workers and small peasants—the overwhelming majority of the population—are denied all these things. As long as that state of affairs prevails, “equality", i.e., “pure democracy", is a fraud. The first thing to do to win genuine equality and enable the working people to enjoy democracy in practice is to deprive the exploiters of all the public and sumptuous private buildings, to give to the working people leisure and to see to it that their freedom of assembly is protected by armed workers, not by heirs of the nobility or capitalist officers in command of downtrodden soldiers. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3334
Lenin: The Paris Commune —to which all who parade as Socialists pay lip service (for they know that the workers ardently and sincerely sympathize with though Commune) —showed very clearly the historically conventional nature and limited value of the bourgeois parliamentary system and bourgeois democracy; institutions which, though highly progressive compared with medieval times, inevitably require a radical alteration in the era of proletarian revolution. It was Marx who best appraised the historical significance of the Commune. In his analysis, he revealed the exploiting nature of bourgeois democracy in the bourgeois parliamentary system under which the oppressed classes enjoy the right to decide once in several years which representative of the propertied classes shall “represent and suppress” ( ver- und zertreten ) the people in parliament. And it is now, when the Soviet movement is embracing the entire world and continuing the work of the Commune for all to see, that the traitors to socialism are forgetting the concrete experience and concrete lessons of the Paris Commune and repeating the old bourgeois rubbish about “democracy in general”. The Commune was not a parliamentary institution. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3335
Lenin: History teaches us that no oppressed class ever did, or could, achieve power without going through a period of dictatorship, i.e., the conquest of political power and forceable suppression of the resistance always offered by the exploiters—the resistance that is most desperate, most furious, and that stops at nothing. The bourgeoisie, whose domination is now defended by the Socialists who denounce “dictatorship in general” and extol “democracy in general", won power in the advanced countries through a series of insurrections, civil wars, and the forcible suppression of kings, feudal lords, slaveowners and their attempts at restoration. In books, pamphlets, Congress resolutions, and propaganda speeches, Socialists have everywhere thousands and millions of times explained to people the class nature of these bourgeois revolutions and this bourgeois dictatorship. That is why the present defense of bourgeois democracy under the cover of talk about “democracy in general", and the present howls and shouts against proletarian dictatorship under the cover of shouts about “dictatorship in general", are an outright betrayal of socialism. They are, in fact, desertion to the bourgeoisie, denial of the proletariat’s right to its own, proletarian revolution, and a defense of bourgeois reformism at the very historical juncture when bourgeois reformism throughout the world has collapsed and the war has created a revolutionary situation. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3336
