Portal:Communism/Quotes archive

"Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. Working men of all countries, unite!" Karl Marx "The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality." Che Guevara "I worked at a factory owned by Germans, at coal pits owned by Frenchmen, and at a chemical plant owned by Belgians. There I discovered something about capitalists. They are all alike, whatever the nationality. All they wanted from me was the most work for the least money that kept me alive. So I became a communist." Nikita Khrushchev "Communism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen." Leon Trotsky "The devotion of such titans of spirit as Lenin to an Ideal must bear fruit. The nobility of his selflessness will be an example through centuries to come, and his Ideal will reach perfection." Mahatma Gandhi "Today's Communism can survive only if it abandons the myth of an infallible party, if it continues to think, and if it becomes democratic." Friedrich Durrenmatt "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." Karl Marx "Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism." Vladimir Lenin "The way people get their living determines their social outlook." Karl Marx "In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat." Leon Trotsky "The American Indians were Communists. They were. Every anthropologist will tell you they were Communists. No rich, no poor. If somebody needed something the community chipped in" Pete Seeger "Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak." Pierre-Joseph Proudhon "Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing." Vladimir Lenin "The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship [in the Soviet Union], if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture." Leon Trotsky "There is no other definition of communism valid for us than that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man." Che Guevara "Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations." Karl Marx "Democracy is the road to socialism." Karl Marx "Communism is the end of the economy as a separate and privileged field on which everything else depends while despising and fearing it." Gilles Dauvé "The political form of a society wherein the proletariat is victorious in overthrowing the bourgeoisie will be a democratic republic." Vladimir Lenin "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." Karl Marx "Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital." Vladimir Lenin "Unity must be won, and only the workers, the class-conscious workers themselves can win it – by stubborn and persistent effort." Vladimir Lenin "The leaders of the petty bourgeoisie must teach the people to trust the bourgeoisie. The proletarians must teach the people to distrust the bourgeoisie." Vladimir Lenin "It is only in revolutionary struggle against the capitalists of every country, and only in union with the working women and men of the whole world, that we will achieve a new and brighter future-the socialist brotherhood of the workers." Alexandra Kollontai "Comrades, just as the earth, after a long drought, pants for rain, so the workers of the world pant for the end of the accursed war, for unification. This striving of the workers for unification is the greatest factor in world history." Gregory Zinoviev "The words Socialism and Communism have the same meaning. They indicate a condition of society in which the wealth of the community: the land and the means of production, distribution and transport are held in common, production being for use and not for profit." Sylvia Pankhurst "Our object is the economic freedom of the producing classes; this ultimate goal will be attained after a long and bitter struggle; therefore, our primary task is to organize the masses and lead them in the struggle for economic freedom." M. N. Roy "...We should try to link our personal lives with the cause for which we struggle, with the cause of building communism." Nadezhda K. Krupskaya "Workers in the bourgeois countries must fight for equal rights for men and women." Nadezhda K. Krupskaya "Socialism is not spontaneous. It does not arise of itself. It has abiding principles according to which the major means of production and distribution ought to be socialised if exploitation of the many by the few is to be prevented; if, that is to say, egalitarianism in the economy is to be protected." Kwame Nkrumah "You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society." Karl Marx "For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while 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, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic." Karl Marx