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"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.
"I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-classed
muscle man for Big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short,
I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international
banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and
especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light
to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped
make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect
revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics
for the benefit of Wall Street...."
"In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality,
while the living person is dependent and has no individuality."
"With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent will
ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent certain will produce eagerness;
50 per cent positive audacity; 100 per cent will make it ready to trample
all human laws; 300 per cent, and there is not a crime at which it will
scruple nor risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being
hanged."
"The collapse of the global marketplace would be traumatic event with
unimaginable consequences. Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation
of the present regime."
"At particular times, a great deal of stupid people have a great deal
of stupid money...the money of these people - the blind capital - is particularly
large and craving. It seeks someone to devour it and there is a plethora;
it finds someone and there is speculation; it is devoured and there's panic."
"The production of too many useful things results in too many useless
people."
"Do not forget that this great free market capitalism we enjoy was founded
upon stealing every inch of this country from the Indians and building
a good share of it on slave labour."
"We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated
in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
"It is erroneous thinking to say that a tax beak for someone working
from paycheque to paycheque is more important than it is to wealthy individuals."
"In a higher phase of communist society . . . only then can the narrow
horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on
its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his
needs."
"In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity
but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates
the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing
today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon,
rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind,
without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic."
"Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body
will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more
musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average
human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.
And above these heights, new peaks will rise."
"The end may justify the means as long as there
is something that justifies the end."
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;
they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The
tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain
of the living."
"So many people are gonna read this because Krist Novoselic wrote it but let me tell you this, I am a man of the proletariat! This is quite a boast coming from my tax bracket. Remember, socialism is an ethic not an ideology! I write this under the gaze of an actual portrait, not a print, of Lenin..." Krist Novoselic (Nirvana Band Member) "I believe there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and
those doing the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between
those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who
want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will
be that kind of clash, but I dont think it will be based on the colour
of the skin."
"Hear me people: We now have to deal with another race---small and feeble
when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely
enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possessions is
a disease with them. These people have made many rules which the rich may
break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak
to support the rich and those who rule."
"When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same
as that of a physicist or a biologist who is asked if he is a "Newtonian,"
or if he is a "Pasteurian." "
"The Marxist analysis has got nothing to do with what happened in Stalin's
Russia: it's like blaming Jesus Christ for the Inquisition in Spain."
"What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes
is only bound up with particular, historic phases in the development of
production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship
of the proletariat; (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes
the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society."
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the
point, however, is to change it."
"Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world
as masturbation to sexual love."
"Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes
contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity."
You cannot have capitalism without racism.
"We fight racism with solidarity. We do not fight exploitative capitalism
with Black Nationalism. We fight capitalism with basic socialism. And we
do not fight imperialism with more imperialism. We fight imperialism with
proletarian internationalism."
"Racism and ethnic differences allow the power structure to exploit
the masses of workers in this country, because that's the key by which
they maintain their control. To divide the people and conquer them is the
objective of the power structure..."
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless
world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
"In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents,
men of a different stamp; some of them survivors of and devotees to past
revolutions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving
popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force
of tradition; others mere brawlers, who, by dint of repeating year after
year the same set of stereotyped declamations against the government of
the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first
water. . . ". They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off.
"The product of mental labor-science-always stands far below its value,
because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all
to the labor-time required for its original production."
"Our party's most outstanding mediocrity."
"The Stalinist bureaucratic counter-revolution was like a pirate attack on the high seas; the ship of Revolution was boarded and hijacked, and the entire crew put to the sword. Stalin, the self-appointed great helmsman, together with his crew of usurpers struck out on an entirely new course, towards a sea of retreats, betrayals and the abandonment of Marxism, which later led inevitably to shipwreck." Vsievolod Volkov (L. Trotsky's grandson) "Under all conditions well-organized violence seems to him the shortest
distance between two points."
"In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous
at an inopportune time. "
"The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production
into State property. But in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat,
abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also
the State as State. ...
"We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour,
but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another
man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most
time's carcass."
"There are only two sorts of people in life you can trust—good Christians
and good Communists."
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