Dialectical Materialism Quotes

“[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

“If there are no isolated phenomena in the world, if all phenomena are interconnected and interdependent, then it is clear that every social system and every social movement in history must be evaluated not from the standpoint of "eternal justice" or some other preconceived idea, as is not infrequently done by historians, but from the standpoint of the conditions which gave rise to that system or that social movement and with which they are connected.”
― Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism

“To be intellectually humble is not to live in constant doubt. Rather, it’s to live with a mind open to correction, and a heart strong enough to prioritize truth over pride.”
― Mason Carter, Critical Thinking Unchained: From Formal Logic to Dialectics of Emancipation

“Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

“We must draw up a plan for the formation of such a corps with several million people taking up the study of dialectical materialism and historical materialism, the theoretical basis of Marxism, and combating all shades of idealism and mechanical materialism. At present there are many cadres doing theoretical work, but there is still no corps of theoretical workers, much less a powerful one. Without such a corps, the cause of the entire Party, the socialist industrialization and socialist transformation of our country, the modernization of our national defence and our research in atomic energy cannot move along or succeed. I therefore recommend that you comrades read philosophy.”
― Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung: Volume V

“Marx, Engels, and Lenin have carried on the tradition of rational and non-mystical approach to all human problems; this is the tradition of the best Greek philosophers and the founders of modern science. Careful analysis; separation of factors; the following of causes into their effects; reliance on experiments; all are taken over into Marxism and provide it with a hard scientific core. There is nowhere any pandering to special intuitions or spiritual experiences.”
― J.D. Bernal, Engels and Science

“The interpenetration of chance and determination bears on the problem of how there can be a scientific approach to society when individual human behavior and consciousness seem unpredictable. Those who despair to point out that people are not machines, that there are subjective processes in the making of decisions, that it is not 'classes' but individuals who make choices. Terms such as "the human factor" or "subjective factors" with their implication of chance and unpredictability are invoked as the negation of regularity and lawfulness. And indeed it is true that individual behavior and consciousness are the consequences of intersection of a large number of weakly determining factors. But it does not follow that where there is choice, subjectivity, and individuality there cannon also be predictability. The error to take the individual as causally prior to the whole and not to appreciate that the social has causal properties within which individual consciousness and action are formed. While the consciousness of an individual is not determined by his/her class position but is influenced by idiosyncratic factors that appear as random, those random factors operate within a domain and with probabilities that are constrained and directed by social forces.”
― Richard C. Lewontin, Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, agriculture, and health

“When questions arise of possible harmful effects of pesticides, the defenders of the products always try to narrow the scope of the inquiry to their most immediate, direct and measurable consequences and then downplay them, The critics of pesticides, on the other hand, urge that the ecosystem is strongly interconnected, highly variable and vulnerable. Thus debates around environmental impact become debates on the philosophy of nature: are things readily isolated or richly interacting? Is the average behavior of chemicals and organisms an adequate basis for decision making or must we be concerned with the unevenness of the world? Shall we "be realists" and stick to measurable costs and benefits, or shall we concern ourselves with all kinds of consequences of what we do? Gradually we see a confrontation of the world views of mechanistic reductionism and of dialectical materialism.”
― Richard Levins, The Dialectical Biologist

“Lenin clearly and unambiguously poses the question of the relationship
between the ‘form’ of materialism and its ‘essence’, of the impermissibility of
identification of the former with the latter. The ‘form’ of materialism is found
in those concrete-scientific ideas about the constitution of matter (about the
‘physical’, about ‘atoms and electrons’) and in natural scientific generalizations
of these ideas that are inevitably turn out to be historically limited, changing,
subject to reconsideration by the natural science itself. The ‘essence’ of materialism is found in the acceptance of the objective reality that exists independently of human cognition and that is only reflected in it. The creative development of dialectical materialism on the basis of the ‘philosophical conclusions derived from the newest discoveries of natural science’ is, according to Lenin, found not in the reconsideration of this essence and not in making the ideas
of natural scientists eternal, but in the deepening of the understanding of the
‘relationship between cognition and the physical world’ that is connected with
these new ideas about nature. The dialectical understanding of the relationship
between the ‘form’ and ‘essence’ of materialism, and therefore, the relationship between ‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology’ constitutes the ‘spirit of dialectical
materialism”
― Evald Ilyenkov, Intelligent Materialism: Essays on Hegel and Dialectics

“At least Tsar Alexander III understood that the game now being played was for the highest stakes. When Giers asked him, '...what would we gain by helping the french destroy Germany?' he replied: 'what we would gain would be that Germany, as such, would disappear. It would break up into a number of small, weak states, the way it used to be'.”
― Henry Kissinger

“Socialists have a big job ahead of them here. They have got to demonstrate, beyond possibility of doubt, just where the line of cleavage between exploiter and exploited comes. Once again it is a question of sticking to the essentials; and the essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk of 'capitalism' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the robbers and the robbed.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“The danger now is that anti-intellectualism [...] is spreading all over the areas of so-called "Western civilisation". It can take many forms, from aggressive clericalism and atom-bomb militarism to the mild but dangerous pessimisms of Kierkegaard and Satre. All these forms have something in common. They all express the belief that man's state cannot be improved by conscious intelligent co-operation. They want less knowledge and more faith and are unanimous in attacking countries where men are trying to build up a scientific civilisation through their own efforts, and in belittling the beliefs which are leading them to do so - the philosophic system of dialectical materialism.”
― J.D. Bernal, Engels and Science

“A critical thinker is not someone who knows all the answers, but someone who keeps asking better questions.”
― Mason Carter, Critical Thinking Unchained: From Formal Logic to Dialectics of Emancipation

“Anger is a natural emotion. It arises when we perceive something unjust, unfair, or threatening. There is nothing inherently wrong in feeling angry. Emotions are part of being human. The real problem arises when we express anger impulsively—especially when it targets another person.”
― Mason Carter, Critical Thinking Unchained: From Formal Logic to Dialectics of Emancipation

“Those who have been forced to study 'dialectical materialism', the strange concoction that was supposed to form the philosophical foundation of Marxism in the Soviet Union and other countries of socialist camp, will never forget the definition Friedrich Engels gave : Life is the mode of existence of protein bodies. If one sets aside the disgust form the relentless drilling of this formula into our poor brains, along with other jewels of Marxist wisdom, it does not sound so bad now, even if trivial and largely beside the point.”
― Eugene V. Koonin, The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution

“In nineteenth century Europe (and later in other parts of the world) the transition from a subsistence to a market economy based on the use of wage labor caused a net loss of autonomy for kin-based groups and households. Individuals became more dependent on external political, economic, and ideological forces. A profound contradiction resulted from the increasing individuation of the labor force and the need to maintain collective mechanisms for the reproduction of the working class through preexisting but constantly evolving patterns of family, household, and kinship organization. In other words, the advance of capitalism created a dynamic opposition between productive and reproductive spheres.”
― Eleanor Burke Leacock, Women's Work: Development and the Division of Labor by Gender

“Behind every light there's darkness”
― Thabiso Monkoe, The Azanian

“There's problem in every solution and a solution in every problem”
― Thabiso Monkoe, The Azanian

“Of course, society, too, changes and develops in accordance with a certain law, not by man’s own will. But the action of law in society is fundamentally different from that of the law of nature.”
― Kim Jong Il, The Juche Philosophy is an Original Revolutionary Philosophy

“Every chemical compound, according to Engels, comes into existence only at a certain time in the development of the universe when the conditions are appropriate for it; and when it does come into existence it manifests this by entering into its characteristic relations. Neither carbon compounds or proteins are ideal forms, but are themselves witnesses of the conditions on a cooling planet. It is here that occurs his celebrated remark that life is the mode of existence of proteins.”
― J.D. Bernal, Marx and Science

“The bourgeois biologist wastes his time in seeking a general explanation for the change of living matter. The dialectical biologist seeks no such general explanation for a change in any part of reality, for change is what reality is. What the dialectical biologist seeks is the determining relations between the new qualities emerging in that change.”
― Christopher Caudwell, Culture as Politics: Selected Writings of Christopher Caudwell

“The true is no longer beautiful, because to be true in bourgeois civilisation is to be non-human.
The beautiful is no longer real, because to be beautiful in bourgeois civilisation is to be imaginary.”
― Christopher Caudwell, Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture

“Of course, science is based on observation, but this is not its most essential feature. The basis of science is not mere observation, but experiment. Science is based on an activity of interfering with nature, changing it. [...] And we test it, develop it, and use it also in changing nature. Science is not a dogma, but a guide to action. On the other hand, if it becomes divorced from practice, it degenerates into dogma.”
― Maurice Cornforth, Dialectical Materialism Volume One (1) Materialism and the Dialectical Method

“Dialectical Materialism teaches us that life originated on earth as a result of the process of development of matter. Nature should be considered not as a state of rest and immobility, stagnation and immutability, but as a state of continuous movement and change. All phenomena should be studied from the standpoint of their continuous renewal and development, their arising and dying away.”
― Olga Borisovna Lepeshinskaya, The Origin of Cells

“It is a development of history that has transformed the political classes into social classes such that, just as the Christians are equal in heaven yet unequal on earth, so the individual members of a people are equal in the heaven of their political world yet unequal in the earthly existence of society.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“The real contradiction between Marx's scientific socialism and all bourgeois philosophy and sciences consists entirely in the fact that scientific socialism is the theoretical expression of a revolutionary process, which will end with the total abolition of these bourgeois philosophies and sciences, together with the abolition of the material relations that find their ideological expression in them.”
― Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy

“The bourgeois standpoint has to stop in theory where it has to stop in social practice — as long as it does not want to cease being a 'bourgeois' standpoint altogether, in other words supersede itself.”
― Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy

“To understand the truth of any object, event, or idea, we must uncover its constitutive relations—the forces, processes, and structures that made it what it is.”
― Mason Carter, Critical Thinking Unchained: From Formal Logic to Dialectics of Emancipation

“The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority to revolutionary tactics, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority — that is the way the road runs.”
― Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution,: And Leninism or Marxism?

“A radical social revolution depends on certain definite historical conditions of economic development as its precondition. It is also only possible where with capitalist production the industrial proletariat occupies at least an important position among the mass of the people. And if it is to have any chance of victory, it must be able to do immediately as much for the peasants as the French bourgeoisie, mutatis mutandis, did in its revolution for the French peasants of that time. A fine idea, that the rule of labour involves the subjugation of land labour! But here Mr Bakunin's innermost thoughts emerge. He understands absolutely nothing about the social revolution, only its political phrases. Its economic conditions do not exist for him. As all hitherto existing economic forms, developed or undeveloped, involve the enslavement of the worker (whether in the form of wage-labourer, peasant etc.), he believes that a radical revolution is possible in all such forms alike. Still more! He wants the European social revolution, premised on the economic basis of capitalist production, to take place at the level of the Russian or Slavic agricultural and pastoral peoples, not to surpass this level [...] The will, and not the economic conditions, is the foundation of his social revolution.”
― Karl Marx, Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy