Ciaran > Ciaran's Quotes

“I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci: Prison Letters

“The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains. They have a world to win.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“Sometimes - history needs a push.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine on a large scale.”
― Rudolf Virchow

“They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger… they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor… They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.”
― Tacitus, The Agricola and The Germania

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
― Dom Helder Camara, Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings

“We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols of things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.”
― Herbert Marcuse

“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."

(Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2003)”
― Edward W. Said

“It is nice that what eventually became the late British Empire has not been ruled by an 'English' dynasty since the early eleventh century: since then a motley parade of Normans (Plantagenets), Welsh (Tudors), Scots (Stuarts), Dutch (House of Orange) and Germans (Hanoverians) have squatted on the imperial throne. No one much cared until the philological revolution and a paroxysm of English nationalism in World War I. House of Windsor rhymes with House of Schönbrunn or House of Versailes.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“the fellow members of even the smallese nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of the communion...Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity or genuineness, but in the style in which they are imagined.”
― Benedict R.O'G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.”
― Michel Foucault

“As Tony Benn, the British Labour politician, once suggested, we should constantly ask those who govern us five questions: What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“But people’s ability to take personal responsibility is shaped by their circumstances. People cannot take responsibility if they cannot control what happens to them.”
― Michael G. Marmot, The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World

“Most of us cherish the notion of free choice, but our choices are constrained by the conditions in which we are born, grow, live, work and age.”
― Michael G. Marmot, The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World

“All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.”
― St. Francis Of Assisi, The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
― Howard Zinn

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
― Voltaire

“In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to have give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realising it is a cliché. The impasse that paralysed Cobain in precisely the one that Fredric Jameson described: like postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in ‘a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, where all that is left is to imitate dead styles in the imaginary museum’.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“The ideological blackmail that has been in place since the original Live Aid concerts in 1985 has insisted that ‘caring individuals’ could end famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or systemic reorganization. It is necessary to act straight away, we were told; politics has to be suspended in the name of ethical immediacy. Bono’s Product Red brand wanted to dispense even with the philanthropic intermediary. ‘Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands’, Bono proclaimed. ‘Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce’. The point was not to offer an alternative to capitalism - on the contrary, Product Red’s ‘punk rock’ or ‘hip hop’ character consisted in its ‘realistic’ acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town. No, the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of particular transactions went to good causes. The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“I have sometimes half believed, although the suspicion is mortifying, that there is only one step between his state who deeply indulges in imaginative meditation, and insanity.”
― Benjamin Disraeli, Contarini Fleming; A Psychological Romance and the Rise of Iskander

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer , Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.”
― Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard