“The class-struggle is the main source of progress, and therefore the nobleman who robs the peasant and goads him to revolt is playing a necessary part, just as much as the Jacobin who guillotines the nobleman.”
“Struggle is daily action against ourselves and against the enemy.”
“Revolutionaries need poets, too.”
“I will weep with you over the children of kings, provided that you will weep with me over the children of the people”
“Study of the past often turns into love of the past and a desire to keep it.”
“Marx was concerned to change society or rather, if he adhered rigidly to his system, expected society to change in the way he wanted.”
“Revolutions occurred in almost every European city with more than 50,000 inhabitants. The occasion for the revolutions was hunger.”
“Sometimes the best solution to make a revolution is your personal evolution. And sometimes your personal evolution is not possible without a revolution.”
“If there is any period one would desire to be born in, ⎯ is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”
“Once you expand the meaning of freedom, you expand the universe within…”
“Make existential liberation your spiritual orientation.”
“Liberation is an existential art. Liberation is a spiritual art.”
“O.K., so I’m not so smart. I’m working class. But it’s the working class that keeps the world running, and it’s the working class that gets exploited. What the hell kind of revolution have you got just tossing out big words that working-class people can’t understand? What the hell kind of social revolution is that? I mean, I’d like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody’s really being exploited, we’ve got to put a stop to it. That’s what I believe, and that’s why I ask questions. Am I right, or what?”
“Your worst enemy is not the person in opposition to you. It is the person occupying the spot you would be fighting from and doing nothing.”
“Nothing proves better the irreparable decay of the party system than the great efforts after this war to revive it on the Continent, their pitiful results, the enhanced appeal of movements after the defeat of Nazism, and the obvious threat of Bolshevism to national independence. The result of all efforts to restore the status quo has been only the restoration of a political situation in which the destructive movements are the only parties that function properly. Their leadership has maintained authority under the most trying circumstances and in spite of constantly changing party lines. In order to gauge correctly the chances for survival of the European nation-state, it would be wise not to pay too much attention to nationalist slogans which the movements occasionally adopt for purposes of hiding their true intentions, but rather to consider that by now everybody knows that they are regional branches of international organizations, that the rank and file is not disturbed in the least when it becomes obvious that their policy serves foreign-policy interests of another and even hostile power, and that denunciations of their leader as fifth columnists, traitors to the country, etc., do not impress their members to any considerable degree. In contrast to the old parties, the movements have survived the last war and are today the only parties which have remained alive and meaningful to their adherents.”
“It appears to general observation, that revolutions create genius and talents; but those events do no more than bring them forward. There is existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which, unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that condition, to the grave. As it is to the advantage of society that the whole of its faculties should be employed, the construction of governments ought to be such as to bring forward, by a quiet and regular operation, all that extent of capacity which never fails to appear in revolutions.”
“I m for the revolutionaries but against the revolution.”