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I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people. (Eduardo Galeano)
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The problem of Trotskyism is not a struggle between tendencies within the Chinese Communist Party, for between communists and Trotskyists there is no link, absolutely not one link: It is a question that concerns the entire people: the struggle against the Fatherland. (Ho Chi Minh)
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The alternatives that confront humanity to-day are serious enough; but they are alternatives of the destruction and anarchy of capitalism, involving still greater poverty and misery in the midst of abundance and rising productive power, or the social organisation of production, bringing abundance for all. The “overpopulation” (like the simultaneous “overproduction”) is only relative to the capitalist conditions of production. (R. Palme Dutt)
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When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to fascism to maintain itself. (Durruti)
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Anarchism is a product of despair. The psychology of the unsettled intellectual or the vagabond and not of the proletarian. (Lenin)
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Anarchism is bourgeois individualism in reverse. Individualism as the basis of the entire anarchist world outlook. (Lenin)
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It has been my endeavour to show in this work that a fall of wages would have no other effect than to raise profits. (David Ricardo)
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The sole “property” of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside the mind. (Lenin)
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Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.… (Helen Keller)
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To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize? (Kevin Alfred Strom)
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Unhappy is the land that needs a hero. (Bertolt Brecht)
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You no doubt know that the greatest part of this victory was achieved by the Soviet people, by the people who live in the republics of the former Soviet Union. Unfortunately, we used to believe that the 20th century was the bloodiest, but we now see in the 21st century a new danger to humanity in the form of terrorism. (Bashar al-Assad)
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There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that? (David Ben Gurion)
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An unjust law is itself a species of violence. (Mahatma Gandhi)
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Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living. (Mary Harris (Mother) Jones)
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Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. (Camus)
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Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance. (Vaclav Havel)
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A riot is the language of the unheard. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
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Standing up for your rights does not make you a radical, it makes you a human being. (Tupac Shakur)
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Above all, what socialist, without flushing with shame, maintains he is not a revolutionary? We say: none! (Johann Most)
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When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right. (Victor Hugo)
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I was born in revolution. (Mary Harris (Mother) Jones)
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If nothing is left, one must scream, because silence is the biggest crime against humanity. (Nadezhda Mandelstam)
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One of the symptoms of revolution is the sudden increase in the number of ordinary people who take an active interest in politics. (Lenin)
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We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it. (Che Guevara)
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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. (Mahatma Gandhi)
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The king must die so that the country can live. (Robespierre)
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To love without role, without power plays, is revolution. (Rita Mae Brown)
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A right delayed is a right denied. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight is a miserable creature. (John Stuart Mill)
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The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. (Steve Biko)
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The spirit of revolution will not die while the hearts of these workers continue to beat. (Ernst Toller)
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He is no revolutionist who would have the revolution of the proletariat only under the “condition” that it proceed smoothly. (Tchernychewski)
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We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death. (Angela Davis)
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Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty” – supposedly petty – details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for “paupers”!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc., – we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy. (Lenin)
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So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. (Voltaire)
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I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts. (Abraham Lincoln)
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In politics, nothing happens by accident, if it happens, you can be sure we planned it that way. (Franklin D. Roosevelt)
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People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction. (James Baldwin)
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You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming. (Pablo Neruda)
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That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of nations, is as shocking as it is true; but when those who are concerned in the government of a country, make it their study to sow discord, and cultivate prejudices between nations, it becomes the more unpardonable. The Rights of Man”, circa 1792 (Thomas Paine)
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When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. (Plátōn)
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A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. (Edward R. Murrow)
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If our nation is ever taken over, it will be taken over from within. (James Madison)
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Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. (James Madison)
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The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves. (Dresden James)
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Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain. (Napoléon Bonaparte)
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All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. (Voltaire)
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All war is based on deception. (Sun Tzu)
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All the promises of the free market have turned out to be lies. (Chris Hedges)
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If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. (JFK)
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If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. (Henry A. Wallace)
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Another threat, less overt but no less basic, confronts liberal democracy. More directly linked to the impact of technology, it involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific knowhow. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Under such circumstances, the scientific and technological momentum of the country would not be reversed but would actually feed on the situation it exploits. (Zbigniew Brzezinski)
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The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. (Henry A. Wallace)
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Materialism is the recognition of “objects in themselves”, or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies of images of those objects. (Lenin)
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The one who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The one who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been. (Albert Einstein)
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Rich men and crooks are two sides of the same coin, two of the main elements nourished by capitalism. (Lenin)
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The friends of peace in bourgeois circles believe that world peace and disarmament can be realised within the frame-work of the present social order, whereas we, who base ourselves on the materialistic conception of history and on scientific socialism, are convinced that militarism can only be abolished from the world with the destruction of the capitalist class state. (Rosa Luxemburg)
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A single factory, potentially capable of supplying a whole continent with its particular product, cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda, with the vast public in order to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable. (Edward Bernays)
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Inside of many liberals is a fascist struggling to get out. (John McCarthy)
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So you have two types of Negro. The old type and the new type. Most of you know the old type. When you read about him in history during slavery he was called “Uncle Tom.” He was the house Negro. And during slavery you had two Negroes. You had the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negro usually lived close to his master. He dressed like his master. He wore his master’s second-hand clothes. He ate food that his master left on the table. And he lived in his master’s house–probably in the basement or the attic–but he still lived in the master’s house. So whenever that house Negro identified himself, he always identified himself in the same sense that his master identified himself. When his master said, “We have good food, ” the house Negro would say, “Yes, we have plenty of good food.” “We” have plenty of good food. When the master said that “we have a fine home here, ” the house Negro said, “Yes, we have a fine home here.” When the master would be sick, the house Negro identified himself so much with his master he’d say, “What’s the matter boss, we sick?” His master’s pain was his pain. And it hurt him more for his master to be sick than for him to be sick himself. When the house started burning down, that type of Negro would fight harder to put the master’s house out than the master himself would. But then you had another Negro out in the field. The house Negro was in the minority. The masses–the field Negroes were the masses. They were in the majority. When the master got sick, they prayed that he’d die. [Laughter] If his house caught on fire, they’d pray for a wind to come along and fan the breeze. If someone came to the house Negro and said, “Let’s go, let’s separate, ” naturally that Uncle Tom would say, “Go where? What could I do without boss? Where would I live? How would I dress? Who would look out for me?” That’s the house Negro. But if you went to the field Negro and said, “Let’s go, let’s separate, ” he wouldn’t even ask you where or how. He’d say, “Yes, let’s go.” And that one ended right there. (Malcolm X)
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To fight against the impossible and win. (Fidel Castro)
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Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours…Everything we don’t grab will go to them. (Ariel Sharon)
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The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government. (Cornelius Tacitus)
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In the so called mistakes of Stalin lies the difference between a revolutionary attitude and a revisionist attitude. You have to look at Stalin in the historical context in which he moves, you don’t have to look at him as some kind of brute, but in that particular historical context. I have come to communism because of daddy Stalin and nobody must come and tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin. I read him when it was very bad to read him. That was another time. And because I’m not very bright, and a hard-headed person, I keep on reading him. Especially in this new period, now that it is worse to read him. Then, as well as now, I still find a Seri of things that are very good. (Che Guevara)
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Now, to balance the scale, I’d like to talk about some things that bring us together, things that point out our similarities instead of our differences. ‘Cause that’s all you ever hear about in this country. It’s our differences. That’s all the media and the politicians are ever talking about—the things that separate us, things that make us different from one another. That’s the way the ruling class operates in any society. They try to divide the rest of the people. They keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other so that they, the rich, can run off with all the fucking money! Fairly simple thing. Happens to work. You know? Anything different—that’s what they’re gonna talk about—race, religion, ethnic and national background, jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality, anything they can do to keep us fighting with each other, so that they can keep going to the bank! You know how I define the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep ’em showing up at those jobs. (George Carlin)
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You will burn in Hell for thousands of migrants from Africa and for supporting Al-Qaeda. (Muammar Gaddafi)
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That white person you see calling himself a liberal is the most dangerous thing in the western hemisphere…he’s like a fox. (Malcolm X)
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The big lie about capitalism is that everyone can be rich. That’s impossible. Capitalism works only if the vast majority of the population are kept poor enough to never quit working, are kept poor enough to accept distasteful jobs society cannot function without. If everyone were a millionaire, who would empty the trash or repair the sewers? It follows that the poorer the general population is made, the greater the worth of the money held by the wealthy, in terms of the lives which may be bought and sold with it. (Michael Rivero)
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By the later years of the Reagan regime, a preferred nomenclature suited to U.S. interests became standardized for the Third World. In the case of nations to be rolled back (e.g., Nicaragua), governments were called terrorist and the insurgents were labeled democratic. In the case of countries to be supported against “communist” insurgencies (e.g., El Salvador and the Philippines), the governments were called democratic and the insurgents were labeled terrorists. (Thomas Bodenheimer)
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Death squads have been created and used by the CIA around the world – particularly the Third World – since the late 1940s, a fact ignored by the elite-owned media. (Ralph McGehee)
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We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population. (Israel Koenig)
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Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom. (Alexis de Tocqueville)
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U.S. Naval psychologists specially selected men for these commando tasks from submarine crews, paratroops, and some convicted murderers were being released from prisons to become assassins. (Thomas Narut)
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Authoritarian government required to speak, is silent…Representative government required to speak, LIES with impunity. (Napoléon Bonaparte)
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The first casualty of war is truth. (Rudyard Kipling)
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The modern liberal state … often uses deception to gain its ends — not so much deception of the foreign enemy, but of its own citizens, who have been taught to trust their leaders. (Howard Zinn)
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… U. S. business wants a “favorable climate of investment” abroad, and … military regimes that will crush labor unions and otherwise serve foreign business meet that demand. (Edward Herman)
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With unfailing consistancy, U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries … whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate interests. (Michael Parenti)
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U.S. Ieaders commit war crimes as a matter of institutional necessity, as their imperial role calls for keeping subordinate peoples in their proper place and assuring a “favorable climate of investment” everywhere. They do this by using their economic power, but also (by means of “bombs bursting in the air” and) by supporting Diem, Mobutu, Pinochet, Suharto, Savimbi, Marcos, Fujimori, Salinas, and scores of similar leaders. War crimes also come easily because U.S. Ieaders consider themselves to be the vehicles of a higher morality and truth and can operate in violation of law without cost. It is also immensely helpful that their mainstream media agree that their country is above the law and will support and rationalize each and every venture and the commission of war crimes. (Edward Herman)
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As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society. (Robert McChesney)
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Peace cannot exist without equality. (Edward Said)
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The great masses of the people at the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously evil … they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. (Hitler)
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We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too.… Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure? (Curtis LeMay)
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All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda. (Upton Sinclair)
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Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement – in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods. (Friedrich Engels)
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Class-conscious workers stand for the complete unity of the workers of all countries in each and every educational, industrial, and political organisation. (R. F. Andrews)
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In Lenin I honor a man, who in total sacrifice of his own person has committed his entire energy to realizing social justice. I do not find his methods advisable. One thing is certain, however: men like him are the guardians and renewers [Erneuerer] of mankind’s conscience. (Albert Einstein)
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Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. (Karl Marx)
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Israel was created by Western imperialism and maintained by Western firepower. (Huey P. Newton)
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The masses are the teachers of everything and the creators of everything. (Kim Jong-il)
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Against the collective power of the propertied classes, the working class cannot act as a class except by constituting itself into a political party distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed from the propertied classes. (Karl Marx)
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The Muslim Terrorist Apparatus was Created by US Intelligence as a Geopolitical Weapon. (Zbigniew Brzezinski)
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The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks…. And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul. (Stalin)
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We will not surrender. We will defeat them by any means. We are ready for the fight, whether it will be a short or a long one. We will be victorious in the end. This assault is by a bunch of fascists who will end up in the dustbin of history. (Muammar Gaddafi)
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The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets. (Frank Church)
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Market society was born in England—yet it was on the Continent that its weaknesses engendered the most tragic complications. In order to comprehend German fascism, we must revert to Ricardian England. The nineteenth century, as cannot be overemphasized, was England’s century. The Industrial Revolution was an English event. Market economy, free trade, and the gold standard were English inventions. These institutions broke down in the twenties everywhere—in Germany, Italy, or Austria the event was merely more political and more dramatic. But whatever the scenery and the temperature of the final episodes, the long-run factors which wrecked that civilization should be studied in the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, England. (Karl Polanyi)
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Empire is emerging today as the center that supports the globalization of productive networks and casts its widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within its world order — and yet at the same time it deploys a powerful police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order. (Antonio Negri)
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The substitution of one social system for another is a complicated and long revolutionary process. It is not simply a spontaneous process, but a struggle, it is a process connected with the clash of classes. Capitalism is decaying, but it must not be compared simply with a tree which has decayed to such an extent that it must fall to the ground of its own accord. No, revolution, the substitution of one social system for another, has always been a struggle, a painful and a cruel struggle, a life and death struggle. And every time the people of the new world came into power they had to defend themselves against the attempts of the old world to restore the old power by force; these people of the new world always had to be on the alert, always had to be ready to repel the attacks of the old world upon the new system. (Stalin)
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For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight. (John Maynard Keynes)
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All propaganda for socialism must be refashioned from abstract and general to concrete and directly practical. (Lenin)
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Capitalism is religion. Banks are churches. Bankers are priests. Wealth is heaven. Poverty is hell. Rich people are saints. Poor people are sinners. Commodities are blessings. Money is God. (Miguel D. Lewis)
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The only symbol of superiority that I know is kindness. (Beethoven)
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We fully regard civil wars, i.e., wars waged by the oppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against slave-owners, serfs against land-owners, and wage-workers against the bourgeoisie, as legitimate, progressive and necessary. (Lenin)
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One of the biggest and most dangerous mistakes made by Communists is the idea that a revolution can be made by revolutionaries alone. On the contrary, to be successful, all serious revolutionary work requires that the idea that revolutionaries are capable of playing the part only of the vanguard of the truly virile and advanced class must be understood and translated into action. (Lenin)
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I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. (Jorge Luis Borges)
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We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy. (Chris Hedges)
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I’m more and more convinced it’s only through communism that we can become human. (Frida Kahlo)
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This fascist state intends to kill all of us. We must organize resistance. Violence can only be answered with violence. This is the generation of Auschwitz [referring to the West German government and society], you cannot argue with them. (Gudrun Ensslin)
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Marxism-Leninism … teaches that the legal relationships (and, consequently, law itself) are rooted in the material conditions of life, and that law is merely the will of the dominant class, elevated into a statute. (Andrei Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky)
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The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. (Karl Marx)
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If, by being revolutionary, one means rational rebellion against intolerable social conditions, if, by being radical, one means “going to the root of things,” the rational will to improve them, then fascism is never revolutionary. (Wilhelm Reich)
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The whole history of my life, and in essence the whole history of the working class consists of this: that we have lived and fought under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin. (Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin)
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Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths. (John Kenneth Galbraith)
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The present-day capitalist economy in China is a capitalist economy which for the most part is under the control of the People’s Government and which is linked with the state-owned socialist economy in various forms and supervised by the workers. It is not an ordinary but a particular kind of capitalist economy, namely, a state-capitalist economy of a new type. It exists not chiefly to make profits for the capitalists but to meet the needs of the people and the state. True, a share of the profits produced by the workers goes to the capitalists, but that is only a small part, about one quarter, of the total. The remaining three quarters are produced for the workers (in the form of the welfare fund), for the state (in the form of income tax) and for expanding productive capacity (a small part of which produces profits for the capitalists). Therefore, this state-capitalist economy of a new type takes on a socialist character to a very great extent and benefits the workers and the state. (Mao Zedong)
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He who fights, can lose. He who doesn’t fight, has already lost. (Bertolt Brecht)
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We have a marvelous Georgian who has sat down to write a big article for Prosveshcheniye, for which he has collected all the Austrian and other materials. (Lenin)
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The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. (Gramsci)
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Make the economy scream [in Chile] to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him. (Richard Nixon)
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You cannot trust in imperialism, not even a little bit… Not at all! (Che Guevara)
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Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians. In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. (Karl Marx)
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Principle of exaggeration and disfigurement. Make any anecdote, however small, a serious threat. (Joseph Goebbels)
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The bourgeoisie will use any and every instrument of struggle as occasion arisese It is for the working class and its allies to be prepared for the fight in front. (R. Palme Dutt)
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Every specific turn in history causes some change in the form of petty-bourgeois wavering, which always occurs alongside the proletariat, and which, in one degree or an other, always penetrates its midst. This wavering flows in two “streams”: petty-bourgeois reformism, i.e., servility to the bourgeoisie covered by a cloak of sentimental democratic and “Social”-Democratic phrases and fatuous wishes; and petty-bourgeois revolutionism—menacing, blustering and boastful in words, but a mere bubble of disunity, disruption and brainlessness in deeds. This wavering will inevitably occur until the taproot of capitalism is cut. (Lenin)
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Since 1954, however, we have not parachuted teams into the Soviet Union – our number one enemy – to destabilize that country… Neither do we run these violent operations in England, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, or Switzerland. Since the mid-1950s they have all been conducted in Third World countries where governments do not have the power to force the United States to stop its brutal and destabilizing campaigns. (John Stockwell)
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In essence, Marxism and Marxist notions need to evolve with the development of historical conditions. It is on the basis of Marxist methodology that Marxism evolves. In the conditions of the last stage of capitalism, imperialism, Marxism becomes Marxism-Leninism. Refuting Leninism is tantamount to decrying Marxism, as anti-Leninism is rendered a form of anti-Marxism. Marxism to- day cannot be understood without Lenin’s contribution to Marxism. (R. Palme Dutt)
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Yet the Second World War began not as a war with the U.S.S.R., but as a war between capitalist countries. Why? Firstly, because war with the U.S.S.R., as a socialist land, is more dangerous to capitalism than war between capitalist countries; for whereas war between capitalist countries puts in question only the supremacy of certain capitalist countries over others, war with the U.S.S.R. must certainly put in question the existence of capitalism itself. Secondly, because the capitalists, although they clamour, for “propaganda” purposes, about the aggressiveness of the Soviet Union, do not themselves believe that it is aggressive, because they are aware of the Soviet Union’s peaceful policy and know that it will not itself attack capitalist countries. (Stalin)
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It’s not my fault if reality is Marxist. (Che Guevara)
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At the bottom of genuinely national wars, such as took place especially between 1789 and 1871, was a long process of mass national movements, of a struggle against absolutism and feudalism, the overthrow of national oppression, and the formation of states on a national basis, as a prerequisite of capitalist development. The national ideology created by that epoch left a deep impress on the mass of the petty bourgeoisie and a section of the proletariat. This is now being utilised in a totally different and imperialist epoch by the sophists of the bourgeoisie, and by the traitors to socialism who are following in their wake, so as to split the workers, and divert them from their class aims and from the revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie. The words in the Communist Manifesto that “the working men have no country” are today truer than ever before. Only the proletariat’s international struggle against the bourgeoisie can preserve what it has won, and open to the oppressed masses the road to a better future. (Lenin)
Protestation (English)
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