Great Throughts Treasury

"The bourgeoisie has played a most revolutionary role in history... It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation." - Karl Marx (1818-1883) German Philosopher, Socialist and Friedrich Engels

"The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation. " - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"In China, although in the main socialist transformation has been completed with respect to the system of ownership, and although the large-scale and turbulent class struggles of the masses characteristic of the previous revolutionary periods have in the main come to an end, there are still remnants of the overthrown landlord and comprador classes, there is still a bourgeoisie, and the remolding of the petty bourgeoisie has only just started. The class struggle is by no means over. The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the class struggle between the different political forces, and the class struggle in the ideological held between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will continue to be long and tortuous and at times will even become very acute. The proletariat seeks to transform the world according to its own world outlook, and so does the bourgeoisie. In this respect, the question of which will win out, socialism or capitalism, is still not really settled." - Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao

"Just as there is not a single thing in the world without a dual nature (this is the law of the unity of opposites), so imperialism and all reactionaries have a dual nature - they are real tigers and paper tigers at the same time. In past history, before they won state power and for some time afterwards, the slave-owning class, the feudal landlord class and the bourgeoisie were vigorous, revolutionary and progressive--they were real tigers. But with the lapse of time, because their opposites - the slave class, the peasant class and the proletariat - grew in strength step by step, struggled against them more and more fiercely, these ruling classes changed step by step into the reverse, changed into reactionaries, changed into backward people, changed into paper tigers. Moreover, eventually they were overthrown, or will be overthrown, by the people. The reactionary, backward, decaying classes retained this dual nature even in their last life-and-death struggles against the people. On the one hand, they were real tigers; they devoured people, devoured people by the millions and tens of millions. The cause of the people's struggle went through a period of difficulties and hardships, and along the path, there were many twists and turns. To destroy the rule of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism in China took the Chinese people more than a hundred years and cost them tens of millions of lives before the victory in 1949. Look! Were these not living tigers, iron tigers, real tigers? Nevertheless, in the end they changed into paper tigers, dead tigers, and bean-curd tigers. These are historical facts. Have people not seen or heard about these facts? There have indeed been thousands and tens of thousands of them! Thousands and tens of thousands! Hence, imperialism and all reactionaries, looked at in essence, from a long-term point of view, from a strategic point of view, must be seen for what they are - paper tigers. On this, we should build our strategic thinking. On the other hand, they are also living tigers, iron tigers, real tigers that can devour people. On this, we should build our tactical thinking." - Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao

"Even as rigorous a determinist as Karl Marx, who at times described the social behaviour of the bourgeoisie in terms which suggested a problem in social physics, could subject it at other times to a withering scorn which only the presupposition of moral responsibility could justify." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr

"When it gets dark enough you can see the stars." - Russell Lynes, fully Joseph Russell Lynes, Jr.

"Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"A full 'definition of an object must include the whole of human experience, both as a criterion of truth and a practical indicator of its connection with human wants." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"At all costs we must break the old, absurd, savage, despicable and disgusting prejudice that only the so-called upper classes, only the rich, and those who have gone through the school of the rich, are capable of administering the state and directing the organizational development of socialist society." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"I absolutely do not pretend in the slightest fashion to knowledge of military science." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Let us...take the most concrete example of state capitalism...It is Germany. Here we have the 'last word' in modern, large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organization, subordinated to Junker-bourgeois imperialism. Cross out the words in italics and [substitute] a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, and you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Materialism is the recognition of "objects in themselves", or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies of images of those objects." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"One of the biggest and most dangerous mistakes made by Communists is the idea that a revolution can be made by revolutionaries alone. On the contrary, to be successful, all serious revolutionary work requires that the idea that revolutionaries are capable of playing the part only of the vanguard of the truly virile and advanced class must be understood and translated into action." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of another in the endeavour to keep them disunited. Class-conscious workers, realizing that the break-down of all the national barriers by capitalism is inevitable and progressive, are trying to help to enlighten and organize their fellow-workers from the backward countries." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The bourgeoisie is many times stronger than we. To give it the weapon of freedom of the press is to ease the enemy’s cause, to help the class enemy. We do not desire to end in suicide, so we will not do this." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"The intellectuals who are accustomed to serving the capitalists and the capitalist state say in order to console themselves: You cannot do without us. But their insolent assumption has no truth in it; educated men are already making their appearance on the side of the people, on the side of the working people, and are helping to break the resistance of the servants of capital." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin