“We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.”
“Há partidos que, por força numérica ou coesiva ou ambas, conforme os sistemas de governo, são quase continuamente detentores do poder -partidos do governo. Outros há que, pelos motivos opostos, estão quase continuamente fora do poder - partidos de oposição. Os arranjistas , os que se servem da política para lucro própia, matemial ou moral, convergem naturalmente para os partidos de governo, sem outro princípio que a própria conveniência. Os turbulentos, os revoltados-natos, convergem naturalmente para os partidos de oposição, sem outro principio que o seu oposicionismo temperamental. Como, porém, os partidos se não formam em torno de conveniências ou de turbulências, pois que estas não tem em si mesmo poder coesivo, segue que estes elementos, por sua natureza discordantes, constituem um perigo, pelo menos latente, para o partido em que estão. [...]”
“No one knows how many Russians in all fled the homeland. Perhaps one million, perhaps many more. We are interested here in seventeen, the senior Romanovs, the grand dukes and grand duchesses who escaped the revolution.”
“The Americans invented the 2nd Amendment. The French invented the le madame guillotine . Neither was invented for hunting.”
“Revolution is not for the faint of heart. It is for monsters. You have to lose who you are to discover what you can become.”
“By being uninvolved we almost participate in the most outrageous practices.”
“The bourgeoisie, in truth, is bound to fear the stupidity of the masses so long as they remain conservative, and the insight of the masses as soon as they become revolutionary.”
“I cannot predict the future, though I sound certain: because I can pursue a future.”
“A woman is a socialist, who brings revolution and change in the family.”
“Papa s ghost might have whispered in her ear, there would be consequences, some of them not fair. How else would you know you had done something, if there was no change? No shift in the world?”
“When the individuals and classes that have gained wealth, honours and power through revolution emerge as champions of ordered government, they do not surrender anything.”
“In my opinion the basic cause for the relative failure of the two greatest revolutions in history resides not, to borrow again from Voline, in historic inevitability, or simply in the subjective errors of revolutionary actors. The revolution bears within itself a serious contradiction (a contradiction which fortunately—and we will return to the subject —is not irremediable and is attenuated with time): it can only arise, it can only vanquish if it issues from the depths of the popular masses, from their irresistible spontaneous uprising; but although the class instinct drives the popular masses to break their chains, they are yet lacking in education and consciousness. And since, in their formidable but tumultuous and blind drive towards liberty, they run up against privileged, conscious, educated, organized, and tested social classes, they can only vanquish the resistance they meet if they succeed in obtaining in the heat of the struggle, the consciousness, the science, the organization, and the experience they lack. But the very fact of forging the weapons I have just listed summarily, and which alone can ensure their superiority over the enemy, bears an immense peril within it: that of killing the spontaneity that is the very spirit of the revolution; that of compromising freedom through organization; that of allowing the movement to be confiscated by an elite minority of more educated, more conscious, more experienced militants who, to begin with, offer themselves as guides in order, in the end, to impose themselves as chiefs and to subject the masses to new forms of the oppression of man by man.”
“The form of coercion that the proletarian vanguard finds itself forced to exercise against counter-revolutionaries is of so fundamentally different a nature from the past forms of oppression, and it is compensated for by so advanced a degree of democracy for the formerly oppressed, that the word dictatorship clashes with that of proletariat.”
“Communists are not isolated from the proletariat. Their action is never an attempt to organize others, only to express their own subversive response to the world. Ultimately, revolutionary initiatives will interconnect. But our task is not primarily one of organisation: it is to convey (in a text or an action) an antagonistic relation to the world. However big or small it may be, such an act is an attack against the old world.”
“Death! Death! We will not let you die. The people of the future will sing your name and your monstrosities.”
“Революции – не повивальные бабки, и не локомотивы, а глистогонные средства истории.”
“Enclosures have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich is against the poor. The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of vio¬lence, often by pressure and intimidation. They were literally robbing the poor of their share in the common, tearing down the houses which, by the hitherto unbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regarded as theirs and their heirs . The fabric of society was being disrupted; desolate villages and the ruins of human dwellings testified to the fierce¬ness with which the revolution raged, endangering the defenses of the country, wasting its towns, decimating its population, turning its over¬burdened soil into dust, harassing its people and turning them from decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves.”