Was curious if there were any quotes that we’d like to share.
It’s pretty hard to find anything from Stalin for example that isn’t blatantly made up to demonize him.
One of my favourites is indeed a Stalin quote.
It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a society personal and any other freedom can exist for real and not on paper.
Kinda cool that after reading a bit of theory, you start recognizing where this quotes come from. Iirc this one is from that interview with a famous writer hg wells? I think.
“No investigation, no right to speak.”
– obscure Marxist theoretician from China“Top 10 quotes to utilize during your average leftist infighting session”
Great quote by Irish socialist James Connolly, essentially the difference between socialist republicanism and plain nationalism
“If you remove the English Army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle., unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts will be in vain. England will still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.
Fr explaining this simple concept to a global south lib is an impossible task.
Might honestly reference this quote for a good outline when trying to do work on my dad, he’s warm to Pan-Arabism but it’s always been harder to push him any further left than “America bad”
Most epic quote ever:
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” - lenin
favorite usable quote:
“it is said that cameras don’t lie, but we must remember that liars use cameras” - michael parenti (could use it with statistics too since many people like to parrot that stats don’t lie)
bonus quote:
“With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.” - Richard Stallman ( not a socialist at all )
on pragmatism i like this one by deng, thought it could be confused with machiavellism:
“It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.” - Deng Xiaoping
Came here to say the Lenin one. The Parenti one made me lol, great quote as well
Its from Inventing Reality
A1 quotes
This one resonates with me in particular:
"As revolutionaries, we don’t have the right to say we are tired of explaining. We must never stop explaining. We know that when the people understand, they cannot help but follow us.”
-Thomas Sankara
Very similar old but gold I love:
"I dissuade Party members from putting down people who do not understand. Even people who are unenlightened and seemingly bourgeois should be answered in a polite way. Things should be explained to them as fully as possible. I was turned off by a person who did not want to talk to me because I was not important enough. Maurice just wanted to preach to the converted, who already agreed with him. I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. You cannot win them over by drawing a line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other; that shows a lack of consciousness. After the Black Panther Party was formed, I nearly fell into this error. I could not understand why people were blind to what I saw so clearly. Then I realized their understanding had to be developed.
-Huey Newton
I live this way as often as I can. I cannot tell you how many times I bit my tongue until my anger settled, or erased a text or a comment and rewrote it nicer or at least more neutral, even to fascists. I meet people where they are, gain some level of trust, and then try to introduce them to new ideas, or I meet them head on but make sure to always respect them and spin it as “you have been lied to by the powers that be” instead of “you are evil and stupid, die please.”
Huey is fucking great, everytime I read something new about him is great
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Documents can wait, hunger cannot - Stalin on a famine in India
Any enemy of uncle Sam is a friend of mine (something along these lines) - Malcolm X when meeting Fidel Castro in Harlem
There is one quote that is really good. Its from a Brazilian Marxist João Carvalho during a live podcast right after the election of Bolsonaro, and he is explaining why the he believes the only path forward is a revolutionary one and not reformist.
He goes fucking nuclear and his whole speech goes hard as fuck but specialy these parts:
Capitalism has failed, fails and will fail in every society where it put its tentacles, that are based on the expropiation and the exploitation of men by men
And also:
The worst real socialism is better than the best capitalism.
I might subtitle this video in english one day so you guys can see it, it’s amazing
If you ever do, definitely share it here!!!
Based
“You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves.”
-Stalin
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
Full quote:
spoiler
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
(Marx, Selected Works, Vol. I, pp. 269-70.)
Leon Trotsky is certainly not my favourite figure, but this quote goes hard…
“If you cannot convince a fascist, acquaint his face with the pavement”
There’s always the Parenti quote.
The quote
In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
– Michael Parenti, Blackshirts And Reds
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Not favourite but fun and new for me, i read it today in Lenin letters:
“A small fish is better than a big cockroach”
what is the context of this lmao
He wrote that few times, usually to Gorky, about bolshevik press and party. Mostly in two meanings:
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Better small newspaper being printed and distributed now than huge plans that can easily fail.
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Better to have less people but trusted comrades (small fish) than unify the party with liquidators who want to destroy it (big cockroach).
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It scarcely needs proof that there is not the slightest possibility of carrying out these tasks in a short period, of accomplishing all this in a few years. Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition from capitalism to communism, must not be regarded as a fleeting period of “super-revolutionary” acts and decrees, but as an entire historical era, replete with civil wars and external conflicts, with persistent organisational work and economic construction, with advances and retreats, victories and defeats. The historical era is needed not only to create the economic and cultural prerequisites for the complete victory of socialism, but also to enable the proletariat, firstly, to educate itself and become steeled as a force capable of governing the country, and, secondly, to re-educate and remould the petty-bourgeois strata along such lines as will assure the organisation of socialist production.
- Stalin
Reminder that there is a quotes community for any quotes! https://lemmygrad.ml/c/quotes
