Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man’s lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one’s self.
-- Max Stirner
The revolutionary war is a war of the masses; only mobilizing the masses and relying on them can wage it.
-- “Be Concerned with the Well-Being of the Masses, Pay Attention to Methods of Work” (January 27, 1934), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 147.
I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.
-- Hegel, Letter to Niethammer, 13 October 1806
It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness.
-- Marx, The Paris Commune (1871)
History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.
-- Marx, Letter to His Father (1837)
All efforts and all attention should now be concentrated on the next step — the search after forms of the transition or the em>approach to the proletarian revolution.
-- Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)
Our schoolteacher should be raised to a standard he has never achieved, and cannot achieve, in bourgeois society. This is a truism and requires no proof.
-- Lenin, Pages from a Diary (1923)
Workers in the bourgeois countries must fight for equal rights for men and women.
-- Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, Preface to The Emancipation of Women in Writings of V.I. Lenin (1933)
Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.
-- Marx, Private Property and Communism (1844)
One must not count in thousands, like the propagandist belonging to a small group that has not yet given leadership to the masses; in these circumstances one must count in millions and tens of millions.
-- Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)
The revolution will move forward until its consolidation is total. The time is still far off when there can be a period of relative calm. And life is always revolution.
-- Antonio Gramsci, The Russian Maximalists (1916)
Policy and tactics are the life of the Party; leading comrades at all levels must give them full attention and must never on any account be negligent.
-- “A Circular on the Situation” (March 20, 1948), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. IV, p. 220.
It is often said that Anarchists live in a world of dreams to come, and do not see the things which happen today. We do see them only too well, and in their true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forest of prejudice that besets us.
-- Peter Kropotkin
Our stand is that of the proletariat and of the masses. For members of the Communist Party, this means keeping to the stand of the Party, keeping to Party spirit and Party policy.
-- “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art” (May 1942), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 70.
Logic shows that the subjective which is to be subjective only, the finite which would be finite only, the infinite which would be infinite only, and so on, have no truth, but contradict themselves, and pass over into their opposites
-- Hegel, Shorter Logic (1830)
That today, when the wave has ebbed, there remain and will remain only real Marxists, does not frighten us but rejoices us.
-- Lenin, Two Letters (1908)
The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning.
-- Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1831)
The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.
-- Frederick Engels, The Principles of Communism (1847)
The single members of the body are what they are only by and in relation to their unity. A hand e.g. when hewn off from the body is, as Aristotle has observed, a hand in name only, not in fact.
-- Hegel, Shorter Logic (1830)
We must not be like some Christians who sin for six days and go to church on the seventh, but we must speak for the cause daily, and make the men, and especially the women that we meet, come into the ranks to help us.
-- Eleanor Marx, Speech on the First May Day (1890)
