Reuben > Reuben's Quotes

“To get the most out of life you must be active, you must live and you must have the courage to taste the thrill of being young”
― Friedrich Engels

“Being human means throwing your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be, all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“Nature made me happy and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society's fault.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

“And in the darkness I smile at life, as if I were the possessor of charm which would enable me to transform all that is evil and tragical into serenity and happiness. But when I search my mind for the cause of this joy, I find there is no cause, and can only laugh at myself.”
― Rosa Luxemburg, Letters from Prison to Sophie Liebknecht: July 1916–October 1918

“We have to take everything as it comes and to find beauty in everything. That's what I manage to do.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“People for the most part pass by the loveliest things in life without paying attention.”
― Rosa Luxemburg, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg

“Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with - the love of life”
― Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

“The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.”
― Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

“Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.”
― Karl Marx

“I can't listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“Yeah, because I'm extremely romantic here. You know what is my fear? This postmodern, permissive, pragmatic etiquette towards sex. It's horrible. They claim sex is healthy; it's good for the heart, for blood circulation, it relaxes you. They even go into how kissing is also good because it develops the muscles here – this is horrible, my God! It's no longer that absolute passion. I like this idea of sex as part of love, you know: 'I'm ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever.' There is something nice, transcendent, about it. I remain incurably romantic.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”
― Ernesto 'Che' Guevara

“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d”
― Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

“Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.”
― Rousseau

“To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.”
― Jean Jacques Rosseau

“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Only prisoners have time to read, and if you want to engage in a twenty-year long research project funded by the state, you will have to kill someone.”
― Mark Fisher

“ Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root.”
― Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love

“People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.”
― Emma Goldman

“If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.”
― Emma Goldman

“Politicians promise you heaven before election and give you hell after”
― Emma Goldman

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
― Antonio Gramsci

“Take it aisy”
― Friedrich Engels

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“Music is liquid architecture; Architecture is frozen music.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven.”
― William Wordsworth, The Prelude

“[Letter to his wife, Natalia Sedova]

In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”
― Leon Trotsky