Benoît Mandelbrot: So limited is our knowledge that we resort, not to science, but to shamans. We place control of the world's largest economy in the hands of a few elderly men, the central bankers. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4961
Otto von Bismarck: The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots and the bankers went anew to grab the riches. I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America and use it to systematically corrupt modern civilization. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4963
Oliver Cox: The proletariat cannot vote for socialism in a bourgeois parliament because the capitalists will not permit themselves to be destroyed by their own instrument. The machinery of the capitalist state has been fashioned by the bourgeoisie to suit the needs of their class; therefore, in the achievement of its ends, the working class must contrive its own institutions. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4965
George L. Jackson: An electoral choice of ten different fascists is like choosing which way one wishes to die. The holder of so-called high public office is always merely an extension of the hated ruling corporate class. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4967
Bible: When you come to the land the Lord your God is giving you and take it over and live in it and then say, “I will select a king like all the nations surrounding me,” you must select without fail a king whom the Lord your God chooses. From among your fellow citizens you must appoint a king – you may not designate a foreigner who is not one of your fellow Israelites. Moreover, he must not accumulate horses for himself or allow the people to return to Egypt to do so, for the Lord has said you must never again return that way. Furthermore, he must not marry many wives lest his affections turn aside, and he must not accumulate much silver and gold. When he sits on his royal throne he must make a copy of this law on a scroll given to him by the Levitical priests. It must be with him constantly and he must read it as long as he lives, so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and observe all the words of this law and these statutes and carry them out. Then he will not exalt himself above his fellow citizens or turn from the commandments to the right or left, and he and his descendants will enjoy many years ruling over his kingdom in Israel. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4969
Stalin: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4971
Erich Fromm: Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4973
Wilhelm Reich: The working men and women who think and act in a work-democratic way do not come out against the politician. It is not his fault or his intention that the practical result of his work exposes the illusionary and irrational character of politics. Those who are engaged in practical work, regardless what field they are in, are intensely concerned with practical tasks in the improvement of life. Those who are engaged in practical work are not against one thing or another. It is only the politician who, having no practical tasks is always against and never for something. Politics in general is characterized by this ‘being against’ one thing or another. That which is productive in a practical way is not accomplished by politicians, but by working men and women, whether it is in accord with the politicians’ ideologies or not. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4974
Wilhelm Reich: A shoemaker who loses himself in mystical ecstasy and begins to think of himself as a saviour of the people, sent by God, will inevitably cut the soles the wrong way and mess up his stitches. As time goes on, he will be faced with starvation. It is precisely by this process, on the other hand, that the politician becomes strong and rich. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4975
Thomas Sowell: When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4977
Napoleon Bonaparte: In my youth, I, too, entertained some illusions; but I soon recovered from them. The great orators who rule the assemblies by the brilliancy of their eloquence are in general men of the most mediocre political talents: they should not be opposed in their own way; for they have always more noisy words at command than you. Their eloquence should be opposed by a serious and logical argument; their strength lies in vagueness; they should be brought back to the reality of facts; practical arguments destroy them. In the council, there were men possessed of much more eloquence than I was: I always defeated them by this simple argument—two and two make four. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4979
Clara Zetkin: At present the proletariat has urgent need for self-defense against fascism, and this self-protection against fascist terror must not be neglected for a single moment. At stake is the proletarians’ personal safety and very existence; at stake is the survival of their organizations. Proletarian self-defense is the need of the hour. We must not combat fascism in the way of the reformists in Italy, who beseeched them to “leave me alone, and then I’ll leave you alone.” On the contrary! Meet violence with violence. But not violence in the form of individual terror—that will surely fail. But rather violence as the power of the revolutionary organized proletarian class struggle. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4980
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: 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
Pancho Villa: My sole ambition is to rid Mexico of the class that has oppressed her and given the people a chance to know what real liberty means. And if I could bring that about today by giving up my life, I would do it gladly. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4991
Friedrich Engels: The entire capital of our bankers, merchants, manufacturers and large landowners is nothing but the accumulated and unpaid labor of the working class. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4993
Buzz Aldrin: From space it has an almost benign quality. Intellectually one could realise there were wars underway, but emotionally it was impossible to understand such things. The thought reoccurred that wars are generally fought for territory or are disputes over borders; from space the arbitrary borders established on Earth cannot be seen. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote4994
