Lenin: All oppressing classes stand in need of two social functions to safeguard their rule: the function of the hangman and the function of the priest. The hangman is required to quell the protests and the indignation of the oppressed; the priest is required to console the oppressed, to depict to them the prospects of their sufferings and sacrifices being mitigated (this is particularly easy to do without guaranteeing that these prospects will be “achieved”), while preserving class rule, and thereby to reconcile them to class rule, win them away from revolutionary action, undermine their revolutionary spirit and destroy their revolutionary determination. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2785
Karl Marx: Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of private property, through communism. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2790
Karl Marx: Taxes are the life source of the bureaucracy, the army, the priests, and the court – in short, of the entire apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical. By its very nature, small-holding property forms a basis for an all-powerful and numberless bureaucracy. It creates a uniform level of personal and economic relationships over the whole extent of the country. Hence it also permits uniform action from a supreme center on all points of this uniform mass. It destroys the aristocratic intermediate steps between the mass of the people and the power of the state. On all sides, therefore, it calls forth the direct intrusion of this state power and the interposition of its immediate organs. Finally, it produces an unemployed surplus population which can find no place either on the land or in the towns and which perforce reaches out for state offices as a sort of respectable alms, and provokes the creation of additional state positions. By the new markets which he opened with bayonets, and by the plundering of the Continent, Napoleon repaid the compulsory taxes with interest. These taxes were a spur to the industry of the peasant, whereas now they rob his industry of its last resources and complete his defencelessness against pauperism. An enormous bureaucracy, well gallooned and well fed, is the “Napoleonic idea” which is most congenial to the second Bonaparte. How could it be otherwise, considering that alongside the actual classes of society, he is forced to create an artificial caste for which the maintenance of his régime becomes a bread-and-butter question? Hence one of his first financial operations was the raising of officials’ salaries to their old level and the creation of new sinecures. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2793
Hannah Arendt: This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2798
Eduardo Galeano: Wars always invoke noble motives. They kill in the name of peace. In the name of God. In the name of civilisation. In the name of progress. In the name of democracy… And just in case, if so many lies are not enough… the mass media are ready to invent imaginary enemies to justify the conversion of the world into a great madhouse and an immense slaughterhouse. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2799
Eduardo Galeano: Weapons demand wars and wars demand weapons… and the 5 countries that run the United Nations, the ones that have the right of veto in the United Nations, also happen to be the 5 main producers of weapons. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2800
Eduardo Galeano: One wonders: How long will the peace of the world be in the hands of those who make the business of war? How long will we continue to believe that we were born for mutual extermination and that mutual extermination is our destiny? How long? If the world, this world deserves to be another world… The march for peace, the march of October 2nd deserves millions and millions of feet. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2801
Stalin: Under imperialism the powerful capitalist associations (monopolies) and the banks acquired a dominant position in the life of the capitalist states. Finance capital became master in the capitalist states. Finance capital demanded new markets, the seizure of new colonies, new fields for the export of capital, new sources of raw material. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2802
Ernest Hemingway: I am drunk, seest thou? When I am not drunk I do not talk. You have never heard me talk much. But an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2803
Karl Marx: The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of church and state. Thus, not only was education made accessible to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2806
Karl Marx: If the workers are to be able to forcibly oppose the democratic petty bourgeois it is essential above all for them to be independently organized and centralized in clubs. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2807
Lenin: The chief obstacle is the faith part of the class-conscious workers have in the social-imperialists and social-pacifists. Today’s major task must be to destroy the faith in these trends, ideas, methods of policy. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2808
Lenin: These social-pacifists, i.e., socialists in words and vehicles of bourgeois-pacifist hypocrisy in deeds, now play exactly the same part as the Christian priests, who for centuries sought to embellish the policy of the oppressing classes—the slave-owners, feudals and capitalists—and make their rule acceptable to the oppressed classes by preaching Christian love of one’s neighbour and Christ’s commandments. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2809
Edward Gibbon: But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long. The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigor of the military government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2811
Karl Marx: If the free-traders cannot understand how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another, we need not wonder, since these same gentlemen also refuse to understand how within one country one class can enrich itself at the expense of another. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2813
Karl Marx: This must be admitted : when capital remains stationary, commerce and manufacture are not merely stationary but decline, and in this case the workman is the first victim. He goes to the wall before the capitalist. And in the case of the growth of capital, under the circumstances, which, as we have said, are the best for the workingman, what will be his lot? He will go to the wall just the same. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2814
Friedrich Engels: The question of Free Trade or Protection moves entirely within the bounds of the present system of capitalist production, and has, therefore, no direct interest for us socialists who want to do away with that system. Indirectly, however, it interests us inasmuch as we must desire as the present system of production to develop and expand as freely and as quickly as possible: because along with it will develop also those economic phenomena which are its necessary consequences, and which must destroy the whole system: misery of the great mass of the people, in consequence of overproduction. This overproduction engendering either periodical gluts and revulsions, accompanied by panic, or else a chronic stagnation of trade; division of society into a small class of large capitalist, and a large one of practically hereditary wage-slaves, proletarians, who, while their numbers increase constantly, are at the same time constantly being superseded by new labor-saving machinery; in short, society brought to a deadlock, out of which there is no escaping but by a complete remodeling of the economic structure which forms it basis. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2815
Friedrich Engels: If a country nowadays accepts Free Trade, it will certainly not do so to please the socialists. It will do so because Free trade has become a necessity for the industrial capitalists. But if it should reject Free Trade and stick to Protection, in order to cheat the socialists out of the expected social catastrophe, that will not hurt the prospects of socialism in the least. Protection is a plan for artificially manufacturing manufacturers, and therefore also a plan for artificially manufacturing wage laborers. You cannot breed the one without breeding the other. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2816
Che Guevara: A cadre is an individual who has attained sufficient political development to be able to interpret orders emanating from the central (Party) power, making these orders his own and conveying them to the masses. At the same time, the cadre should become aware of the masses’ needs and desires and their most intimate motivations. A cadre is an individual who possesses ideological and administrative discipline, who knows and practices democratic centralism. He knows how to evaluate existing contradictions. The cadre knows how to practice the principle of collective discussion and decision making. His loyalty has been tested. His physical and moral courage have matured with his ideological development. He is always willing to engage in discussion on any matter and to respond to the extent of giving his life for the Revolution. Also, he is an individual capable of analyzing by himself, which enables him to make decisions and to exercise creative initiative without conflicting with discipline. The cadre is a creative leader, a technician with a good political understanding who can reason dialectically, carrying forward his sector of production or developing the masses politically from his post of leadership. This exemplary human being, surrounded by virtues which are difficult to achieve, is present among the people of Cuba. We find him daily. It is essential to use all the opportunities available to develop him to the fullest—educating him and obtaining from him the greatest benefit for the nation. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2817
