Category: Quotes

Quotes about revolution

“It is a know fact that almost all revolutions have been the work, not of the common people, but of the aristocracy, and especially of the decayed part of the aristocracy.” -Pareto

“Revolutions are the locomotives of history.” -Marx

“The bourgeois revolutions of the past required from the universities merely lawyers as the best raw material for politicians; the emancipation of the working class needs, besides, physicians, chemists, agronomists and other specialists; for it is a question not only of leading in the political machinery but also of taking the entire production of society in hand; and here, in place of high-sounding phrases, solid knowledge is needed.” -Engels

“I only know of one France. That of the Revolution. That of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Too bad for the Gothic cathedral.” -Césaire

“Every collective revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of ‘Emergency.’ It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains.” -Hoover

“My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.” -Evola

“A revolution is not a dinner party.” -Mao

“A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.” -Horkheimer

“There is a Satanic element in the French Revolution which distinguishes it from any other revolution known or perhaps that will be known.” -de Maistre

Quotes about democracy

“What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.” -Lippmann

“Our life is connected more and more with experts, but on the other hand, we are less prepared to accept other people’s judgements when making decisions… Democracy is the continual struggle between the expert and the common man.” -Neurath

‘Democracy, and demo­cratic liberties, for all that they are relative and precarious, nonetheless still afford the working class better conditions under which to struggle for its own interests.’ -Thorez

“But the democrat, because he represents the petty bourgeoisie — that is, a transition class, in which the interests of two classes are simultaneously mutually blunted — imagines himself elevated above class antagonism generally.” -Marx

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society… It is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically.” -Bernays

“That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.” -Orwell

“Societies organized around a hierarchy of privilege can afford multiple standards, but a democracy cannot. Double standards mean second-class citizenship.” -Lasch

“The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions similar to those which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon the Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is accordingly here -within ourselves and our institutions…[it] can be won only by extending the application of democratic methods, methods of consultation, persuasion, negotiation, communication, cooperative intelligence, in the task of making our own politics, industry, education, our culture generally, a servant and an evolving manifestation of democratic ideas.” -Dewey

Quotes about the masses, the people, the mob, crowds, the multitude etc.

“Politics begin where the masses are, not where there are thousands, but where there are millions, that is where serious politics begin.” -Lenin

“Under the label of Socialism…the masses are but fodder for the prosperity of a few individuals, the most worthless and polluted ones at that.” -Solzhenitsyn

“Print technology created the public. Electronic technology created the mass.” –McLuhan

“What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.” -Arendt

“The future belongs to crowds.” -DeLillo

“Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand.” -Fanon

“Noisy festivals are a necessity. Idiots love noise, and the multitude are idiots.” -Napoleon

“The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.” -Durkheim

“Without a guiding organisation, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam.” -Trotsky

Quotes about “the state” (strong “statements” haha!)

“What really constitutes a state is a matter of trained intelligence, not a matter of ‘the people.'” -Hegel

“Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” -Mussolini

“The worth of the State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.” -John Stuart Mill

“The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.” -Lippmann

“The State is the coldest of all cold monsters, and coldly it tells lies: ‘I, the State, am the people’.” -Nietzsche

“The modern state, 𝙣𝙤 𝙢𝙖𝙩𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙞𝙩𝙨 𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙢, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital.” -Engels

“Once the running of a state involves a permanent and massive shortage of historical knowledge, that state can no longer be led strategically.” -Debord

“The organizations of this individual freedom were merely the knives with which anti-individual forces shredded the Leviathan and distributed its flesh amongst themselves.” -Schmitt