Quotes of the left

Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains. -- Karl Marx

We should rid our ranks of all impotent thinking. All views that overestimate the strength of the enemy and underestimate the strength of the people are wrong. -- "The Present Situation and Our Tasks" (December 25, 1947), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. IV, p. 173.

Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasing daily. -- Engels, Anti-Dühring (1877)

Workers in the bourgeois countries must fight for equal rights for men and women. -- Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, Preface to The Emancipation of Women in Writings of V.I. Lenin (1933)

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. -- Karl Marx

Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor. -- Peter Kropotkin

If the writer of these lines has succeeded in providing some material for clarifying these problems, he may regard his labours as not having been fruitless. -- Lenin, The Development of Capitaism in Russia, The "The Mission of Capitalism" (1899)

Unity must be won, and only the workers, the class-conscious workers themselves can win it - by stubborn and persistent effort. -- V.I. Lenin, Unity (1914)

We must follow the rule: Better fewer, but better. We must follow the rule: Better get good human material in two or even three years than work in haste without hope of getting any at all. -- Lenin, Better fewer, but Better (1923)

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer. -- Karl Marx

the prime factors in the question of stability are such members of the C.C. as Stalin and Trotsky. I think relations between them make up the greater part of the danger of a split. -- Lenin, Letter to the Congress (1922)

Idlers do not make history: they suffer it! -- Peter Kropotkin

The organs of state must practice democratic centralism, they must rely on the masses and their personnel must serve the people. -- Mao Zedong On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, (February 27, 1957), 1st pocket ed., p. 8.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand. -- Karl Marx

Not only can we manage very well without the interference of the capitalist class in the great industries of the country, but that their interference is becoming more and more a nuisance. -- Engels, Social Classes - Necessary and Superfluous (1881)

That today, when the wave has ebbed, there remain and will remain only real Marxists, does not frighten us but rejoices us. -- Lenin, Two Letters (1908)

The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general. -- Frederick Engels, The Principles of Communism (1847)

Human child birth is an act which transforms the woman into an almost lifeless, bloodstained heap of flesh, tortured, tormented and driven frantic by pain. -- Lenin, Prophetic Words (1918)

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains. -- Rosa Luxemburg

The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist. -- Marx, Poverty of Philosophy (1847)

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future. -- Marx, Preface to First German Edition of Capital (1867)

Everybody talks about imperialism. But imperialism is merely monopoly capitalism. -- V I Lenin, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It (1917)

The most important thing is to know how to awaken in the still undeveloped masses an intelligent attitude towards religious questions and an intelligent criticism of religions. -- Lenin, The Significance of Militant Materialism (1922)

...as I advanced in the tale I came to love reliving this time of struggle for freedom, which was my true existence, and I love losing myself in the memory of this. -- Louise Michelle

All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided. -- Karl Marx, Capital Vol. III Chapter 48 (1883)

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. -- Marx, Letter from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher to Ruge (1843)

And as to prices, they will serve the cause of socialism better, the more honestly they begin to express the real economic relations of the present day. -- Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed (1936)

...We should try to link our personal lives with the cause for which we struggle, with the cause of building communism. -- Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, On Communist Ethics (1924)

In general it is always empirical businessmen we are talking about when we refer to political economists, (who represent) their scientific creed and form of existence. -- Marx, Human Requirements and Division of Labour (1844)

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this. -- Karl Marx

The bourgeoisie is just as necessary a precondition for the socialist revolution as is the proletariat itself. -- Marx, On Social Relations in Russia (1874)

The revolutionary war is a war of the masses; only mobilizing the masses and relying on them can wage it. -- "Be Concerned with the Well-Being of the Masses, Pay Attention to Methods of Work" (January 27, 1934), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 147.

The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison. -- Karl Marx

It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear... -- Bhagat Singh, The Red Pamphlet (1929)

All forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy. -- Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843)

Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs. -- Karl Marx

For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him. -- Karl Marx

It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves. -- Karl Marx

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends. -- Karl Marx

Our stand is that of the proletariat and of the masses. For members of the Communist Party, this means keeping to the stand of the Party, keeping to Party spirit and Party policy. -- "Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art" (May 1942), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 70.

We Communists are like seeds and the people are like the soil. Wherever we go, we must unite with the people, take root and blossom among them. -- "On the Chungking Negotiations" (October 17, 1945), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. IV, p. 58.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. -- Karl Marx

The urban guerrilla is engaged in revolutionary action for the people, and with them seeks the participation of the people in the struggle against the dictatorship and the liberation of the country. -- Carlos Marighella, Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla (1969)

There are two big facts which have set a new stamp on working class life. The one is the advent of the eight-hour working day; the other, the prohibition of the sale of vodka. -- Trotsky, Vodka, the Church and the Cinema (1923)

In a higher phase of communist society, ... - only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! -- Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)

This struggle must be organised, according to "all the rules of the art", by people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity. -- Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, "The Primitiveness of the Economists and the Organization of the Revolutionaries" (1904)

The Bolsheviks could not have retained power for two and a half months, let alone two and a half years, without the most rigorous and truly iron discipline in our Party. -- Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

Religion is the opium of the masses. -- Karl Marx

Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand. -- Marx, The Grundrisse (1857)

Revolutions are the locomotives of history. -- Karl Marx

If the leaders seek only to preserve themselves, that is what they become; preserves, dried preserves. -- Trotsky, Some Questions on American Problems (1940)