Quotes of Wisdom

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that has. -Margaret Mead


Sobre todo, sean siempre capaces de sentir en lo mas hondo cual quier injustica cometida contra cualquiera en cualquier parte del mundo. Es la cualidad mas linda de un revolucionario. -Ernesto Guevara


Intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by government or corporations, and whose raison son d'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles: that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously. - Edward Said


A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress. Indeed, what could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the mechanization of socially necessary but painful performances; the concentration of individual enterprises in more effective, more productive corporations; the regulation of free competition among unequally equipped economic subjects; the curtailment of prerogatives and national sovereignties which impede the international organization of resources. That this technological order also involves a political and intellectual coordination may be a regrettable and yet promising development. The rights and liberties which were such vital factors in the origins and earlier stages of industrial society yield to a higher stage of this society: they are losing their traditional rationale and content. Freedom of thought, speech, and conscience were -- just as free enterprise, which they served to promote and protect -- essentially critical ideas, designed to replace an obsolescent material and intellectual culture by a more productive and rational one. Once institutionalized, these rights and liberties shared the fate of the society of which they had become an integral part. The achievement cancels the premises. To the degree to which freedom from want, the concrete substance of all freedom, is becoming a real possibility, the liberties which pertain to a state of lower productivity are losing their former content. Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical function in a society which seems increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the individuals through the way in which it is organized. - Herbert Marcuse


Neoconservative shifts onto cultural modernism the uncomfortable burden of a more or less successful capitalist modernization of the economy and society. The neoconservative doctrine blurs the relationship between the welcomed process of societal modernization on the one hand, and the lamented cultural development on the other. The neoconservative does not uncover the economic and societal causes for the altered attitudes of all of the following -- hedonism, the lack of societal identification, the lack of obedience, narcissism, the withdrawal from status and achievement competition -- to the domain of "culture." In fact, however, culture is intervening in the creation of all these problems in only a very indirect and mediated fashion - Herbert Marcuse


The tendency for consumption decisions to concentrate around a 'middle-class' identity needs further deconstruction. It does not mean primarily a spontaneous identification with the imposed category of class, but the recognition of a reality based on the large but nevertheless surprisingly structured range of consumption choices which is in turn linked to similar incomes, and the desire for homogeneity... What becomes increasingly important, given this situation, is differentiation within an actually very homogeneous social category, which empirically... takes the form of symbolic competition over details while simultaneously playing down the disruptive and overtly competitive consequences of such rivalry. This is handled not by denying the differnces, but by regarding them as largely symbolic. which gives every actor the opportunity either to accept or to redefine the code, which is thus inherently unstable. But this instability does not produce symbolic chaos; on the contrary, it tends to promote convergence on a very unity of identity, the parameters of which are set both by convention and by the objective consumption possibilities -- what is in the market. -John Clammer


Nil humani a me alienum puto ergo sum. -Terence


This thing we call "civilization"--all these physical and moral comforts, all these conveniences, all these shelters,... constitute a repertory or system of securities which man made for himself like a raft in the initial shipwreck which living always is--all these securities are insecure securities which in the twinkling of an eye, at the least carelessness, escape from man's hands and vanish like phantoms. -Ortega y Gasset


Our deepest fear is that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves: "Who am I to be brilliant, georgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel secure around you. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates us. - Nelson Mandela


Yes, we are part of an historical movement of the ethic of being against the ethic of having. We are part of a movement that believes that human happiness does not reside in our unlimited capacity to consume but in our unlimited capacity to give solidarity to our fellow human beings. We are part of a tradition that believes that people have a mission to accomplish on earth, which is not the search for individual success but the search for the humanity we carry within us. In this way our existence forms part of our continuous historical thread and the path to immortality is to be part of this historic mission. - Juan Antonio Blanco


Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he never will come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds that there is nothing you cannot do for yourselves. - Eugene Debs


...while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. - Eugene V. Debs


The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. - Steve Biko


When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist. - Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife, Brazil


Full opportunity for full development is the unalienable right of all. He who denies it is a tyrant; he who does not demand it is a coward; he who is indifferent to it is a slave; he who does not desire it is dead. The earth for all the people! That is the demand. - Eugene V Debs


I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don't want, and get it. - Eugene V. Debs


Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will. - Frederick Douglas, 1857


Better to starve fighting than to starve working. A slogan of the Lawrence, Massachusetts strike of 1912


Liberty is no more than an empty shell when one class of men is allowed to condemn another to starvation without any measures being taken against them. And equality is also an empty shell when the rich, by exercising their economic monopolies, have the power of life or death over other members of the community. - Jacques Roux, leader of the French Revolution, 1793


It is not individuals who are set free by free competition; it is, rather, capital which is set free. - Karl Marx


The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the Earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system. - Preamble to the IWW Constitution



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