Proletarian Quotes
More Proletarian Quotes
Igreet you as the advanceguard of the world proletarian army. The hour is not far off when?the German people will turn their weapons againsttheircapitalist exploiters. The sun of the socialist revolution has already risen.
— 1917 Speech, Petrograd,16 Apr.
There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money – and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.
oswald spengler— Vol. II, trans. C.F. Atkinson (1928), p. 401
To produce pure proletarian art the artist must be at one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public.
william empson— Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935) p. 15
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.
Friedrich Engels— Principles of Communism (1847)
The proletarian revolution is impossible without the sympathy and support of the overwhelming majority of the working people.
— Collected Works, Vol. 30, pp. 52–62
The proletarian state must effect the transition to collective farming with extreme caution and only very gradually, by the force of example, without any coercion of the middle peasant.
— Collected Works, Vol. 31, pp. 152–64[ ].
This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervishlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.
thomas mann— On German fascism, in "An Appeal to Reason" ["Deutsche Ansprache. Ein Appell an die Vernunft"] in Berliner Tageblatt (18 October 1930); as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter in Order of the Day, Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades (1942), p. 57
The principle of collective leadership is elementary for a proletarian party and for a party of the Lenin type. Nevertheless, we must emphasize this old truth, because for about 20 years we have had practically no collective leadership; there flourished the cult of the individual which was condemned first by Marx and then by Lenin. And this, of course, could not but reflect negatively on the position of the party and its work.
anastas mikoyan— Quoted in "The World almanac and book of facts" - Page 159 - Almanacs, American - 1869
For my part, while I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race.
bertrand russell— Ch. 7: The Case for Socialism.
What life means to me is to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola . The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of "art for art's sake" than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting ashore and then there will be time enough for art.
upton sinclair— Cosmopolitan (October 1906)
Marxism is not only the theory of socialism, it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx’s proletarian socialism logically follows. This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.
joseph stalin— Anarchism or Socialism (1906)
The proletarian state must effect the transition to collective farming with extreme caution and only very gradually, by the force of example, without any coercion of the middle peasant.
— Vladimir Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 31, pp. 152–64[ ].
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.
— Gustave Flaubert, Letter to George Sand (1871).
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.
— Gustave Flaubert (1871), Letter to George Sand
The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries, and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris commune.
— Friedrich Engels, in a letter to Philipp Van Patten (18 April 1883)
