Ashwa

“Culture is something quite different. It is organization, discipline of one’s inner self, a coming to terms with one’s own personality; it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s own rights and obligations.”
― Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935

“As one twentieth-century historian put it: “In an age of anxiety any ‘totalist’ creed exerts a powerful attraction: one has only to think of the appeal of communism to many bewildered minds in our own day.”
― Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

“Roman emperors wanted obedience, not martyrs. They had absolutely no wish to open windows into men’s souls or to control what went on there. That would be a Christian innovation.”
― Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

“Possibility means "freedom". The measure of freedom enters into the concept of man. That the objective possibilities exist for people not to die of hunder and that people do die of hunger, has its importance, or so one would have thought. But the existence of the objective conditions, of possibilities or of freedom is not yet enough: it is necessary to "know" them, and know how to use them.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks