Revolutionaries

"He gave us what still the best known of all Irish novels by dint, not of art, but of love and sincerity. Knocknagow never will die, unless the Irish nation dies."

"Charles J. Kickham was the finest intellect in the Fenian Movement, either in Ireland or America, although his defective sight and hearing prevented the demonstration of that fact in public. One would have to know him personally and to see his work in council to realize the superiority of his mind over those of his colleagues and contemporaries."

"Only poor labouring men! And when was Ireland ever formidable to her oppressor without them? Could emancipation have been won without them? Did not their example shame the "respectable" classes, and even the priests themselves, into doing their duty? Was it not the labouring men who made the O'Connell meetings monster meetings, and their shillings that swelled the O'Connell treasury... For if ever a successful blow is to be struck for the poor old country, it is the hand of the toiler that will strike it."

"Is there a woman scholar in Italy who does not know the persistent and courageous efforts of such intellectually and morally gifted women as Giuseppina Poggiolini, Anna Maria Mozzoni, Laura Mantegazza, Gualberta Beccari, and others, to whom they owe the acquired right of pursuing higher and professional education?"

"All the dispossessed and pariahs of society are on the move; they beg for some light, air, and a life that accords with human dignity. It is therefore only natural that, in our century, a serious and vast movement has emerged among the last and most numerous of pariahs who form half of humanity-that is, women."

"However, with the evolution of modern civilization, the element of physical strength was increasingly eliminated from social activities, industrial production, and even agriculture, so that women of the social classes who earn a living through labor gradually found themselves in a situation more or less the same as that of men. And it is especially in our century that, owing to the laws of political economy-which we will not here take into consideration-and by collaborating directly in the production of social wealth, woman could become aware of her equivalence with man."

"It is true that what has pushed public opinion increasingly against the Germans are excesses committed against the rules of international law that had been established as preventive measures to make war (as it were) less barbaric. But why would we want to punish the authors of such horrors by spreading further carnage? Do we not have a similar burden on our consciences? Who does not recall the ears of Arabs brought back from Libya as souvenirs by our soldiers?"

"The judgment of the civil world will issue a sentence much more useful in its moral effects than punishment inflicted with weapons at our own risk and danger. Thus we must oppose these false enthusiasms, in whatever quarter they arise."

"We women, who feel most responsible for the broken lives and calamities of war, and who therefore are by nature and by logic the most averse to war and least responsive to the lures of patriotism and combat, we are the most vigilant. If in the modest milieux where we live, our modest word can be of any value, let us employ it to dampen false enthusiasms, to recall to reality those who pursue reckless illusions. We, first among all, defend our party against the accusation of cowardice leveled against it. Let those who want to show their courage keep it for other, more sacred and fruitful battles!"

"Another fifteen days have gone by; in this life of uncertainty and anxiety our very soul seems suspended. Our struggles in the field of labor are in a lull, weakened by the crisis that hampers us in affirming any rights. Our educational work seems ironic, now that the war has so deeply disillusioned us about our strengths. Yet we must go on living and waiting; the best we can do is to keep alive in our hearts the ideal flame of faith that seems to blow out under the rush of the storm. Meanwhile let us follow the events of the terrible war: we cannot count the dead, hundreds of thousands if not already a million. The fate that seemed to smile at German audacity now turns against its very arrogance. Like the soul of the common people, we see here a sanction imposed by the justice inherent in things."

"With few exceptions, every man of any social class, owing to an infinity of unflattering reasons for a sex that passes as strong, considers the privilege of his sex as a natural phenomenon and defends it with astonishing tenacity, calling on God, the Church, science, ethics, and existing laws, which are merely the legal sanction of the prevarication of a dominant class and sex. And it is for this reason that, in spite of the intimate connections between these various problems, it seemed to me that I could isolate that of the social condition of woman from all other morbid phenomena of the social organism, mostly generated by that terrible tragedy of life, the struggle for existence."

"I have chosen the question of woman's labor because I think it is the kernel of the whole woman question, as I firmly believe in the following great and fundamental truth of modern ethics, which is valid for both man and woman: labor alone, of whatever nature, divided and remunerated with equity, is the actual source of the enhancement of the human species."

""In Milan there is only one man, who is actually a woman," wrote Antonio Labriola in an 1893 letter to Friedrich Engels, reporting on the "state of the art" of Italian socialism. The woman was Anna Kuliscioff, one of the founding members of the Socialist Party of Italian Workers, whose cosmopolitan militancy in Russia, Switzerland, France, Great Britain, and Italy at the turn of the twentieth century actively contributed to the flourishing of the Socialist International and, above all, to the construction and "deprovincialization" of Italian socialism...The delicate and relentless task of combining-without reconciling-the distinct and at times divergent instances of women's emancipation and class struggle that Kuliscioff first developed in this speech remained through all her writings the hallmark of her much underappreciated socialist feminism."

"Character never joins forces with servility. And, indeed, men and women-especially the latter-who have an independent character are often regarded as rebellious, unsettled and troubled people, a danger to society."

"For the triumph of the cause of my sex, I hope only that men will be slightly less intolerant and women slightly more supportive of each other. Perhaps, at that point, the prophecy of the greatest poet of our century, Victor Hugo, will be realized: he predicted of woman what William Ewart Gladstone predicted of the factory worker-that the nineteenth century would be the "Century of the Woman.""

"It is true that man's fear of competition plays a great role in this, which is dissimulated through social ethics arguments, based mostly on religious biases and habit. But by far most influential is the unconscious fear of having one day to renounce, out of love or necessity, the authority and arrogance of his sex, which has been embedded in man since prehistorical times—and I concede that abdicating power is always a difficult and painful thing."

"It therefore seems to me that only when labor is equitably remunerated, or at least remunerated like man's, will woman take the first and most important step forward, since it is only by becoming economically independent that she will withdraw from moral parasitism and conquer her freedom, dignity, and the actual respect of the other sex. I believe it is only at that point that women will have the moral strength needed not to put up with the pressures of fathers, husbands, and brothers, and will themselves be able to create, among their sex, that powerful weapon of modern social struggles, namely, association, in order to acquire civil and political rights-which are now denied to them, as they are to men interdicted for imbecility, madness, or delinquency. The existing laws inflict this atrocious humiliation on woman, because not only men but also women themselves consider woman as an eternal minor, and she will be able to come of age only when she will be sufficient unto herself through her own intelligence, skills, and moral strengths."

"Nowadays, everybody complains about the decadent character of great and minor men alike. Let woman's character and personality evolve, and you will see woman, the real mother, will raise not cream puffs but real men!"

"An atmosphere of extreme tension reigned during this period; it was necessary to act without mercy. I think that it was justified. If Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Rykov and Zinoviev had started up their opposition in wartime, there would have been an extremely difficult struggle; the number of victims would have been colossal. Colossal. The two sides would have been condemned to disaster. They had links that went right up to Hitler. That far. Trotsky had similar links, without doubt. Hitler was an adventurist, as was Trotsky, they had traits in common. And the rightists, Bukharin and Rykov, had links with them. And, of course, many of the military leaders."

"The governmental machine of the bourgeoisie, consequently also the bourgeois parliaments, are to be broken, disrupted, destroyed, and upon their ruins is to be organized a new power, the power of the union of the working class, the workers' 'parliaments,' i.e., the Soviets. Only the betrayers of the workers can deceive the workers with the hope of a 'peaceful' social revolution, along the lines of parliamentary reforms. Such persons are the worst enemies of the working class, and a most pitiless struggle must be waged against them; no compromise with them is permissible. Therefore, our slogan for any bourgeois country you may choose is: 'Down with Parliament! Long live Soviet power!'"

"Since we are no prophets, none of us can say exactly how many months or years will pass before the victory of the proletarian revolution in the first of those important countries which really determine the fate of the World Revolution. One thing, however, we know exactly, and the new analysis of Europe’s economic situation at the Third Congress has again completely convinced us of it: The revolution is not over. We are not very far distant from the period in which new conflicts will begin, which will shake Europe and the whole world in a much greater degree than the sum total of all previous struggles."

"The articulation of universalism with the sense of Jewish identity took varying forms depending on the different revolutionary currents: for internationalists such as Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Karl Radek and Rosa Luxemburg, the assimilation of a Jewish revolutionary into the concrete universal party, the dissolution of the 'little difference' into the status of equality of the militant, anticipated the society for which they fought; they did not consider the little difference' as called on to crystallize one day in terms of national identity. Were they blind? Blinkered, certainly, in the sense that they underestimated the national dimension of the Jewish problem in Eastern Europe."

"The population of the colonies means nothing but beasts of burden to the gentlemen imperialists. ... The imperialists of all countries treat the peoples who are the objects of their imperialist exploitation as slaves. Naturally the slaves rebel against their tormentors and naturally the strivings of these peoples for freedom and independence become stronger the more often they have the opportunity to conduct a war of defense against their oppressors. The socialists must recognize these wars of the colonial peoples against their European imperialist rulers as just wars of defense."

"Take a walk through the streets and market places of Petrograd and you can really see that every stone is a piece of Russian revolutionary history."

"There is no greater honor than membership in the Communist Party. There is nothing more precious, there can be nothing more precious to us than our party, the splendid organization that has already helped the workers so materially in their hard fight for complete emancipation and that stands ready to help them until the fight is carried to a successful conclusion."

"We were indeed splitters at the beginning of the work of the Communist International. We could not have done otherwise. We were obliged to split the old socialist parties, to save the best revolutionary elements of the working class and to form a rallying point tor the new Communist Party in every country. For a time, we had to come out as splitters, but not one of us regrets it. ... But now, after the passing of two to three years, when we have firmly established our parties everywhere, we must go to the masses and work in such a manner that the simplest worker will understand us. The split for us was no end, but a means to win over the masses, and in my opinion is already half achieved. The masses begin to show a new attitude. They are now forced to see that the split was no selfish aim on our part, and that we are those who call and work for the unity of the revolutionary masses on one platform."

"It was a great privilege to work so closely with these wonderful women of our movement...One of the greatest privileges of all was meeting Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, one of the most selflessly devoted human beings I have ever known. She always worked closely with Lenin, helping him in all his problems, and was technical secretary of the Party's Central Committee during their days of exile, a task which involved the handling of voluminous correspondence under conspiratorial conditions, and the most exacting labor with codes. Originally a teacher, her greatest interest was always in education, and her early work in the revolutionary movement had been organizing workers' study circles. As Vice Commissar of Education, she was in charge of adult education in the U.S.S.R. She told me of the immense problem of overcoming the illiteracy inherited from the tsarist regime. On my later visits she always sent for me to ask me for ideas from America which might be useful to the Soviet educational system."

"He who looks with indifference on life all round him "from the writer's carriage window" will never become a real writer...There is often a great deal of snobbish conceit in budding writers--and even frequently in workers' children, but [it] has to be thoroughly washed away."

"The bourgeoisie of all countries understands to a nicety what a great power the experiences of childhood have over people, and for this reason it endeavours to bring the children up in the bourgeois spirit from their earliest years. The clergy, the teachers servile to the bourgeois Government, the unprincipled penny-a-line children’s authors and the grasping cinema proprietors all work feverishly in this direction."

"The girls must not be tied down to the home, but from the early years should be accustomed to being together, in one organisation with the boys—to be with them on a comradely footing."

"Not everyone can learn from life, from other people."

"...We should try to link our personal lives with the cause for which we struggle, with the cause of building communism...This, of course, does not mean that we should renounce our personal life. The Party of communism is not a sect, and so such asceticism should not be advocated. At a factory, I once heard a woman addressing her work-mates say: "Comrades working women, you should remember that once you join the Party you have to give up husband and children." Of course, this is not the approach to the question. It is not a matter of neglecting husband and children, but of training the children to become fighters for communism, to arrange things so that the husband becomes such a fighter, too. One has to know how to merge one's life with the life of society. This is not asceticism. On the contrary, the fact of this merging, the fact that the common cause of all working people becomes a personal matter, makes personal life richer. It does not become poorer, it offers deep and colourful experiences which humdrum family life has never provided. To know how to merge one's life with work for communism, with the work and struggle of the working people to build communism, is one of the tasks that face us. You, young people, are only just starting out on your lives, and you can build them so that there is no gap between your personal life and that of society..."

"...The woman today is not simply a man's wife, she is a social worker, she wants to educate her children in the new way, she wants her whole day-to-day life to be rearranged of new lines. At every step she feels she lacks knowledge."

"Isn’t it even more cowardly to attack defenseless villages with napalm bombs that kill many thousands of times more? Obviously, planes would make things easier for us. Give us your bombers, sir, and you can have our baskets."

"Give me your planes. I’ll give you my baskets."

"After making a thorough analysis and appraisal of each man, we switched over to combat training, during which “officers teach soldiers, soldiers teach officers, and soldiers teach each other.” Officers and soldiers taught and learned from one another in earnest."

"Most of the officers and men in the PLA had their own histories of blood and tears. Since everybody had kept his bitter experience to himself, the soldiers’ common hatred for the enemy did not turn into a common class feeling."

"As a command officer, I had one good point — I was never satisfied with the victories already won. But I was overanxious to win more victories, so the good point became a shortcoming. Although I reminded myself again and again to guard against impatience, I found it difficult to overcome it."

"Now whoever opposes the Communists and fires the first shot, will be hit by our second shot immediately, then our third shot. This is 'to pay a man back in his own coin'."

"Ironclad evidence had proved that China's Anti-Japanese National United Front could only be led by the proletarian Communist Party, and not by a so-called joint leadership. It was impossible for the Kuomintang of the feudal landlords and comprador bourgeoisie to lead the front, to set up the anti-Japanese democratic coalition government with the “three thirds system”, to transform the reactionary agencies of its party, government and army, and to implement the policy of reducing land rent and interest on loans and developing a national economy."

"I hold that the Hundred Regiments Campaign was a military success. Especially after the Anti-Friction Battle, we had to organize such an anti-Japanese campaign to show that we had to oppose frictions for the sake of resisting Japanese aggression. Only thus could we win over large numbers of middle-of-the-roaders. At that time only by seizing the advantage of a weakly defended enemy rear to launch a vigorous surprise attack could we deal blows at the enemy and restore vast expanses of anti-Japanese base areas. It was not easy to organize such a campaign in a unified and planned way under the condition of dense networks of enemy blockhouses. Our victory helped expose the deceptive propaganda of the Japanese invaders and Chiang Kai-shek. It was also necessary for the accumulation of revolutionary strength."

"Impatience for success means subjectivism in ideology and adventurism in action. This tendency often emerged in me after a series of major victories. This was arrogance. But it won the support of some soldiers at the time."

"A concrete analysis must be made of concrete conditions. Contradictions riddled the old-fashioned armies. We could provide opportunities for ourselves by taking advantage of these contradictions in a flexible manner, but legal and illegal struggles must be closely coordinated to achieve unity of action."

"Our goal was illegal (revolution), and legality was but a means of achieving that goal. Otherwise we would have been using legality for the sake of legality and would have become the will."

"Compared with its enemy, the Red Army had poorer equipment and a far smaller number of men, and had no rear support. But it won a great victory, smashing enemy encirclement through a series of strategies and tactics previously unknown in China and abroad. This was a new development of Marxism-Leninism — Mao Zedong’s military dialectics which expressed the basic content of his military thought which the People’s Liberation Army troops have discussed so often. If imperialism dares launch a new world war, Mao Zedong’s military dialectics remain an important weapon for guiding the people’s war to victory."

"Attack without delay the reactionary county government of Pingjiang, the “civil corps”, the village suppression units and the village suppression committees. Wipe them out resolutely. We are rising in arms! The day has come to serve the workers and peasants!"

"The experience I gained taught me that one must be good at making use of contradictions of all kinds to legalize the illegal such as the rules of the soldiers’ committees which, through our work, were adopted as the objectives of the division school."

"It’s like a tiger after a flock of sheep; Under a blanket of smoke and fire Our army surges forward; The cries of battle reach the sky, The earth and mountains shake, My malaria disappears; The enemy runs helter-skelter, Kicking up dust to the sky; Our brother army has not come, And so you live another day."

"The U.S. occupation of Korea, separated from China by only a river, would threaten Northeast China. Its control of Taiwan posed a threat to Shanghai and East China. The U.S. could find a pretext at any time to launch a war of aggression against China. The tiger wanted to eat human beings; when it would do so would depend on its appetite. No concession could stop it. If the U.S. wanted to invade China, we had to resist its aggression. Without going into a test of strength with U.S. imperialism to see who was stronger, it would be difficult for us to build socialism. If the U.S. was bent on warring against China, it would want a war of quick decision, while we would wage a protracted war; it would fight regular warfare, and we would employ the kind of warfare we had used against the Japanese invaders."

"Old Peng is always an old man whom I respect very much. His spirit will always be the precious spiritual wealth and an important part of our Chinese Communist Party. We must use his spirit to inspire the majority of party members, especially leading cadres, to do their own thing well, to build our country better for the party and the people."