💬 Quotes

"Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song, a gift of sweat and brawn, and a gift of the spirit."

"Whiteness is the ownership of the earth, forever and ever, Amen!"

"Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interest is most vital,—the black workers themselves,—must be welcome, if white America is to make a real step toward democracy."

"We are not better than our fellows, but we are torn by the same passions, and we are led by the same providence."

"The state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of 'order,' which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes."

"During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes have visited relentless persecution on them; their theories have been received with the most savage hostility... After their death, attempts are made to turn them into harmless icons."

"The proletarian revolution is impossible without the forcible destruction of the machinery of state power which was created by the ruling class."

"We want the socialist revolution with human beings as they are now, with human beings who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and 'foremen and accountants.'"

"Until the 'higher' phase of communism arrives, the socialists demand the strictest control by society and by the state over the measure of labor and the measure of consumption."

"Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich—that is the democracy of capitalist society."

"There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of happy, noble human beings."

"Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death."

"To do the best thing easy is the sign of high skill; to do the easiest thing bad is the sign of utter inefficiency."

"It is physically impossible for a well-educated, intelligent, and strenuous man to labor usefully for money only."

"In fact, it may be discovered that the true veins of wealth are purple-and-not in Rock, but in Flesh - perhaps even that the final outcome and consummation of all wealth is in the producing as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy human creatures."

"True economics is the practice of justice: it is to do good work, and to be well paid for it."

"The most extraordinary thing about this man is that he is a man at all; it is his normality that is abnormal."

"Art is the signature of man."

"If a man is not allowed to make a fool of himself, he is not allowed to make anything."

"Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."