Socialists

"Equality of income, which had been a Soviet ideal, was suddenly turned into a crime. Uravnilovka, equalization, was denounced as unworthy of a socialist society. The ‘Party maximum,’ under which Party members had been kept to an income not far above the average, was now removed, releasing torrents of greed and self-seeking in officialdom. Piecework was introduced throughout Soviet economy, even in types of work where such a system of payment was palpably silly if not impossible. With that strange Soviet genius for extremes, the evil of too many bosses was now replaced by the evil of the single and arbitrary boss, in which the last pretense of ‘workers’ control" from below was thrown overboard."

"Joseph Stalin was right in his charge that the leaders feared the truth. They feared it because truth was an almost counter-revolutionary and always dangerous luxury. An honest error of judgment or an unwise technical experiment might be punished by exile or prison as sabotage. To discipline a subordinate for mistakes might prove inhuman, since the police-minded authorities were likely to charge him with willful treason. The flight from responsibility tied the gigantic economic effort into crazy knots. As Golubenko said to me at the time: ‘They want us to rationalize and modernize and cut costs. That's all very fine, Comrade Kravchenko. But as soon as we do something bold or unusual we are risking our lives, aren't we? The safest way is to do nothing.’"

"The breakdown of world capitalism, the end of its ‘temporary stabilization,’ was the great consolation in Russia's travail. Our shrinking food supplies were being rigidly rationed. In the villages, famine held sway. Prisons, isolators and concentration camps were filling up with ‘enemies of the people.’ Thousands of our intelligentsia—engineers, officials, even well-known Communists—had to be liquidated as saboteurs and ‘agents of foreign governments.’ But the international working class was about to revolt! As Stalin put it, ‘The successes of the Five-Year Plan are mobilizing the revolutionary strength of the working class in all countries.’"

"Having discovered that I could write and speak on my feet with some natural eloquence, I was soon an ‘activist.’ I served on all kinds of committees, did missionary work among the non-Party infidels, played a role in the frequent celebrations. There were endless occasions to celebrate, over and above the regular revolutionary holidays. The installation of new machinery, the opening of new pits, the completion of production schedules were marked by demonstrations, music, speeches. Elsewhere in the world coal may be just coal—with us it was ‘fuel for the locomotives of revolution.’"

"I am going to make more hell for the Communists than they dreamed possible."

"I believe profoundly that in the struggle against Communists and their organizations, in the defense of freedom and justice, we cannot and should not resort to the methods and forms employed by the Communists."

"In substance we were told that the triumph of Fascism in Germany was really a disguised victory for the world revolution. It represented the last stand of capitalism, its death agony. The grimacing of the parliamentary harlequins of fake democracy was over. Even with the help of fascist and liberal lackeys, the capitalists could no longer control the discontented masses and had to resort to unadulterated terror through fascism. ‘German Fascism is the spearhead of world capitalism,’ a speaker at the Institute explained. ‘Capitalism finally has thrown off its mask. The workers of the world now face a clear choice between Fascism and Communism. Can we doubt which they will choose? The Soviet Union stands alone as the bulwark against Fascism, and the proletariat of all countries is with us. Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, comrades, are the precursors of our revolution. By revealing the true face of modern capitalism—fascism, they push the masses to an understanding of the truth. There is force in our slogan: The worse the better!"

"We Russians are gregarious folk, warm and talkative and quick to kindle in friendship. We wear our hearts on our sleeves. I am no exception in this respect."

"On a battlefield men die quickly, they fight back, they are sustained by fellowship and a sense of duty. Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been trapped and left to starve, each in his home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital around conference and banquet tables."

"I considered the Kremlin capable of any outrage. Its methods by this time seemed to me little better than those of the Nazis, especially in its treatment of its own people and in the forms of organization of power. Reading or listening to anti-Hitler propaganda, I could not help asking myself inwardly, ‘But how does this differ from our Soviet atrocities?’ All the same, I refused to credit the news of a Soviet pact that freed Hitler to make war on Poland and on the rest of Europe. There must be some mistake, I thought, and everyone around me seemed equally incredulous."

"White stele, on the place you fell, let it stand. That you fell to not be written. White with the Homeland's icon. Only this is suitable to mourn your death; white, marbled, and to mourn."

"Am I a nationalist? Am I a socialist? All of these! But above all I am Human."

"Kodra, dopo aver lasciato l'Albania in dissidio con il regime, tornò una volta a Tirana e venne a casa da mio padre, anch'egli artista. Alla parete c'era appeso un mio disegno astratto. Lo notò subito e disse "continua su questa strada". Portava un basco, un maglione, una sciarpa, si smarcava dall'uniformità che qui vigeva, la barba era proibita come pure i capelli lunghi."

"Turkey is a big and powerful country. We are a small and weak country. But whenever Turkey needs, we will be there. Albanian people will never forget Turkey's help,"

"First they came for Georgia I did not speak out Then they came for Crimea It was not my country So I did not speak out Then they came for the whole Ukraine But I was not Ukrainian And I did not speak out And then they came for me But there was no one left to help and defend me"

"The whole prospect of Gaelic appals me, the more I think of the difficulties and the likelihood of its extinction in a generation or two. A ... language with ... no modern prose of any account, no philosophical or technical vocabulary to speak of, no correct usage except among old people and a few university students, colloquially full of gross English idiom lately taken over, exact shades of meanings of most words not to be found in any of its dictionaries and dialectally varying enormously (what chance of the appreciation of the overtones of poetry, except amongst a handful?) Above all, all economic, social and political factors working against it, and, with that, the notorious, moral cowardice of the Highlanders themselves."

"[T]he Celtic Twilightists achieved the remarkable feat of attributing to Gaelic poetry the very opposite of every quality which it actually has."

"Sorley MacLean's mastery of his chosen medium and his engagement with the European poetic tradition and European politics make him one of the major Scottish poets of the modern era."

"I personally have a great sense of honour and gratitude just for knowing him... It's easier for us to trust in the utter reality of poetry, trust in it as a necessity because you feel it's verified by somebody like him. He saved Gaelic poetry... in this century and therefore in a sense, saved it for all time."

"MacLean's voice had a certain bardic weirdness that sounded both stricken and enraptured."

"He is gifted with what the Welsh call Hwyl, the power of elevated declamation, and his declamation is full of feeling."

"My obsession was the preservation of the Gaelic language so that there would be people left in the world who could hear its great songs as they really were. No poetry could be translated, still less could song poetry, and the great language of Gaelic song made me fanatical about the beauty of the Gaelic language and its astonishing ability to indicate shades and positions of emphasis with natural inversions and the use of particles."

"The best poetry written in our generation in the British Isles has been in Scottish Gaelic, by Sorley MacLean."

"I believe Mull had much to do with my poetry: its physical beauty, so different from Skye’s, with the terrible imprint of the clearances on it, made it almost intolerable for a Gael."

"Although MacLean was very much cast as a representative of Gaelic Scotland when his writing was rediscovered and justly celebrated in the 1980s and afterwards, the resulting mix is comparatively unGaelic, elitist rather then populist, and permeable only with difficulty to the community which uses the language in its day to day existence."

"How many people know that the best living Scottish poet, by a whole head and shoulders, after the two major figures in this century, Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid, is not any of the English writing pocts, but Sorley MacLean? Yet he alone takes his place easily and indubitably beside these two major poets: and he writes only in Gaelic [...] That Sorley MacLean is a great poet in the Gaelic tradition, a man not merely for time, but for eternity, I have no doubt whatever [...] If MacLean is not a major poet, then I do not know what major poetry is."

"Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig ("Tha tìm, am fiadh, an coille Hallaig")"

"And the moral of the story?" I said to Severin when I put the manuscript down on the table. "That I was a donkey," he exclaimed without turning around, for he seemed to be embarrassed. "If only I had beaten her!" "A curious remedy," I exclaimed, "which might answer with your peasant-women-" "Oh, they are used to it," he replied eagerly, "but imagine the effect upon one of our delicate, nervous, hysterical ladies--" "But the moral?" "That woman, as nature has created her and as man is at present educating her, is his enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and work." "At present we have only the choice of being hammer or anvil, and I was the kind of donkey who let a woman make a slave of him, do you understand?" "The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped."

"Science as a system of statements is always an object of discussion. Statements are to be compared with statements, and not with 'experience', or with 'the world', or with something else. All that meaningless doubling belongs to more or less subtle metaphysics and as such must be rejected. Every new statement is to be confronted with existing ones, already brought to a state of harmony between themselves. A statement will be considered correct if it can be joined to them."

"Although what is called ‘philosophical speculation’ is undoubtedly on the decline, many of the practically minded have not yet freed themselves from a method of reasoning, which, in the last analysis, has its roots in theology and metaphysics. No science which pretends to be exact can accept an untested theory or doctrine; yet even in an exact science there is often an admixture of magic, theology, and philosophy. It is one of the tasks of our time to aid scientific reasoning to attain its goal without hindrance. Whoever undertakes this is concerned not so much with ‘philosophy,’ properly speaking, as with ‘anti-philosophy.’ For him there is but one science with subdivisions — a unified science of sciences. We have a science that deals with rocks, another that deals with plants, a third that deals with animals, but we need a science that unites them all."

"Finally it should be noted that the picture education, especially the pictorial statistics, are of international importance. Words carry more emotional elements than set pictures, which can be observed by people of different countries, different parties without any protest; Words divide, pictures unite."

"We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction."

"If one could only fly over the Earth and show everybody, Chinese gardeners live side by side in old fashion. Next to them a capitalist germ cell which puts its feelers out into the country! See the factory chimney smoking! Ships come and go. And in the North, nomads and tribes of hunters who don’t know anything of a capitalist order even though they sell furs to entrepreneurs. A sharpened eye would be able to grasp this. All of this can be grasped and represented in pictures!"

"All content of science, and also their protocol statements that are used for verification, are selected on the basis of decisions and can be altered in principle."

"Quite a few political economists advocate the thesis that a Robinson Crusoe — or what amounts to the same thing, a controlled economy — calculates in terms of profits and losses."

"‘History’ and ‘Political Economy’ have not been differentiated on the basis of systematic reflection; rather, they have been quite different in origin and conceptual structure. Only on further development of both disciplines are they set closer together and merged into a single science, namely ‘Sociology’, which for about a hundred years past has been assimilating other fields of science."

"The primordial forms of all sciences, taken back beyond the rise of writing, lie ultimately in the magic of prehistory. Just as modern man wants to indicate what consequences his actions will have, so also a man who grows up in the magical way of life seeks to find a ground for everything and to find consequences of his action. Magic as a more or less clearly formulated system of tenets shot through with emotional elements, can become independent only when magicians, acting as specialists, proclaim the consequences of certain customs, either esoterically,. e.g. at certain rituals, or exoterically as popular education. The magicians tell what cases are to count as 'equal', and when certain measures shall be used (if we think them ineffective, we call them ceremonies)."

"Towards the end of his life Neurath referred to the ‘mosaic of the sciences’. In the spirit of this formulation we can arrive at an understanding of his life’s work by means of a kind of collage, employing the regulative idea of the unity of science and society."

"Many innovations of current history and philosophy of science were, in fact, anticipated in Neurath’s oeuvre. The rediscovery of Neurath was therefore not merely a phenomenon of academic nostalgia, but itself constitutes research into the conditions and possibilities of changing a paradigm in the philosophy of science."

"The motivationless theory of goods [transfers] can bridge the gulf between history and exact research by securing the important continuity of the research, being linked to both."

"True science consists in systematically examining all possible cases. Exact political economy has not achieved this until now. It does not even encompass all actual cases. This is one of the reason why exact theory finds itself in opposition to the historical school and why it does not have an awful lot to say to those economists who occupy themselves with issues of practical interest, theories of crisis, cartels and trusts."

"The case of Otto Neurath, first author of the Vienna Circle's manifesto, is a revealing one. In the years before the First World War, the young Austrian economist became interested in eugenics, translating (with his wife, Anna Schapire-Neurath) Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius for the first time into German. His most important early work, however, was his analysis of the war economy. War economics, in his view, was a science with well-defined laws and principles which, like ballistics, are "independent of whether one is for or against the use of guns.""

"The attempt to construct a fundamental taxonomy of the sciences encounters great difficulties. For instance, logicians and mathematicians disagree among themselves about the objects of their respective research; there is no agreement on the relation of theoretical physics to empirical knowledge and to mathematics. The so-called social sciences are particularly difficult to classify. They have not been demarcated by systematic considerations. In Duhem and Poincarè, general considerations are not only exemplified, but the origins of the concepts and of the problems are traced right from the initial observation of facts if at all possible."

"The i was dotted and t crossed by Neurath, the chief promoter of physicalism and of other radical neo-positivist theories. He combined physicalism with the theory of coherence and thereby imparted to the latter a purely linguistic form."

"I do not think the line of division runs between people with secular and those with transcendental creeds, but rather between people with a centralized and dominating zeal which may possibly lead to self-sacrifice and the sacrifice of others, without tolerance in principle, and people who are tolerant on principle, having perhaps some transcendental creed, or because they, as empiricists, see the multiplicity of all arguing."

"Carnap, who has so far probably advanced the work of the Vienna Circle the most towards empiricism, made an attempt to create a constitutive constructive system; in this he distinguished two languages: a ‘monologizing’ (phenomenalist) one and an ‘intersubjective’ (physicalist) one. He tries to deduce the physical one from the phenomenalist."

"Only one language comes into question from the start, and that is the physicalist. One can learn the physicalist language from earliest childhood. If someone makes predictions and wants to check them himself, he must count on changes in the system of his senses, he must use clocks and rulers, in short, the person supposedly in isolation already makes use of the ‘intersensual’ and ‘intersubjective’ language. The forecaster of yesterday and the controller of today are, so to speak, two persons."

"In the interest of scientific work, more and more formulations in the unified language of unified science are becoming increasingly precise. No term of unified science, however, is free from imprecision, since all terms are based on terms that are essential for protocol statements, whose imprecision must be immediately obvious to everyone."

"At first the Vienna Circle analysed ‘physics’ in a narrower sense almost exclusively; now psychology, biology,sociology. The task of this movement is unified science and nothing less."

"Overcoming magic often takes the form of theology. From animals and ancestors the path leads to all kinds of spirits. The hypothesis (which already appeared in the magical age) of the little man alongside man, the “soul', and of the special being, 'God', more and more often seeks a parallel process 'behind' processes. Whereas in the magical age, empirically given facts were linked with each other on the basis of primitive theories without the introduction of uncontrollable elements, now their introduction becomes essential."