Adam Smith: To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers…The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4981

Lenin: Proudhon had a natural inclination for dialectics. But as he never grasped really scientific dialectics he never got further than sophistry. This is in fact connected with his petty-bourgeois point of view. Like the historian Raumer, the petty bourgeois is made up of on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand. This is so in his economic interests and therefore in his politics, religious, scientific and artistic views. And likewise in his morals, IN EVERYTHING. He is a living contradiction. If, like Proudhon, he is in addition an ingenious man, he will soon learn to play with his own contradictions and develop them according to circumstances into striking, ostentatious, now scandalous now brilliant paradoxes. Charlatanism in science and accommodation in politics are inseparable from such a point of view. There remains only one governing motive, the vanity of the subject, and the only question for him, as for all vain people, is the success of the moment, the éclat of the day. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4982

Byung-Chul Han: People who fail in the neoliberal achievement-society see themselves as responsible for their lot and feel shame instead of questioning society or the system. Herein lies the particular intelligence defining the neoliberal regime: no resistance to the system can emerge in the first place. In contrast, when allo-exploitation prevails, the exploited are still able to show solidarity and unite against those who exploit them. Such is the logic on which Marx’s idea of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is based. However, this vision presupposes that relations of repression and domination hold. Now, under the neoliberal regime of auto-exploitation, people are turning their aggression against themselves. This auto-aggressivity means that the exploited are not inclined to revolution so much as depression. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4983

Byung-Chul Han: The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4984

Byung-Chul Han: Neoliberalism makes citizens into consumers. The freedom of the citizen yields to the passivity of the consumer. As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in politics –in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like. Politicians and parties follow this logic of consumption too. They have to ‘deliver’. In the process, they become nothing more than suppliers; their task is to satisfy voters who are consumers or customers. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4985

Lenin: The workers' resistance springs from their very conditions of life-the sale of labour-power. Only as a result of this resistance, despite the tremendous sacrifices the workers have to make in the struggle, are they able to maintain anything like a tolerable standard of living. But capital is becoming more and more concentrated, manufacturers' associations are growing, the number of destitute and unemployed people is increasing, and so also is want among the proletariat; consequently, it is becoming harder than ever to fight for a decent standard of living. The cost of living, which has been rising rapidly in recent years, often nullifies all the workers' efforts. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4986

Pier Paolo Pasolini: I have always been astonished and even, to tell the truth, deeply indignant at the clerical interpretation of Christ’s phrase: Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what belongs to God: an interpretation in which is concentrated all of the hypocrisy and the aberration that characterised the Church of the Counter-Reformation. It passed off – however monstrous it may seem – as moderate, cynical, and realistic a statement by Christ which was clearly radical, extremist, and perfectly religious. In fact, Christ could in no way mean to say: please everyone, do not worry about politics, reconcile the advantages of social life with the absolute character of religious life, care for the goat and the cabbage, etc. . (…) By posing this extremist dichotomy, Christ pushes and invites an eternal opposition to Caesar, even if it must be non-violent (unlike that of the zealots). https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4987

Franz Kafka: Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair. Just when everything seems over with, new forces come marching up, and precisely that means that you are alive. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4988