Your Personal Political Heroes (and their quotes)

Just as relevant today, maybe even more so:

quote-the-american-fascist-would-prefer-not-to-use-violence-his-method-is-to-poison-the-channels-of-henry-a-wallace-192334.jpg
 
1)Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.

2)Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.

3)There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.


The one and only, Malcolm X
 
"ask not what your country can do for you"...........................kenny florian
 
Islam is a declaration of the freedom of man from servitude to other men. Thus it strives from the beginning to abolish all those systems and governments which are based on the rule of man over men and the servitude of one human being to another.

Sayid qutb
 
James Mattis gives me all of my favs, here are just a couple-

"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet."

"If in order to kill the enemy you have to kill an innocent, don't take the shot. Don't create more enemies than you take out by some immoral act."


 
Not necessarily a "political hero" of mine, but since we are in the habit of posting quotes by revolutionaries, why not post one from the original Russian revolutionary (the one who perhaps inspired it all), Sergey Nechayev?

"A revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion – the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose – to destroy it.

A revolutionary "must infiltrate all social formations including the police. He must exploit rich and influential people, subordinating them to himself. He must aggravate the miseries of the common people, so as to exhaust their patience and incite them to rebel. And, finally, he must ally himself with the savage word of the violent criminal, the only true revolutionary in Russia"

I'm wondering why the revolutionary has "no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property or even a name of his own"? What could've possibly caused this state of desperation? The miseries of the common people were not created by the revolutionary. He exploits them to effect change within an oppressive environment, which is not of the revolutionary's making.

The revolutionary was already doomed from the start, not by the mere fact that he decided to become a revolutionary, but a desire not to live in shackels. What a dumb quote.
 
George Orwell:

The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world: that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.

Could have picked a lot, but that's a good one to illustrate why I admire him: His ability to always face the truth, while still holding a strong view about right and wrong. He was brutally honest but emphatically not a bothsidesist ("Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.").

William T. Sherman:

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with.

Still sums up liberalism vs. the right today. No war over it now, of course.

I’ve been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It’s entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here.
Suppress it! You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is Hell!

Given the context and who he was talking to, it's even more impressive.
 
“I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsiblity on the West Coast.” - Viktor E. Frankl

"It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
 
“Do you want to make it impossible for anyone to oppress his fellow-man? Then make sure that no one shall possess power.”
Mikhail Bakunin
“Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.”
Lucy Parsons
“A government, that is a group of people entrusted with making the laws and empowered to use the collective power to oblige each individual to obey them, is already a privileged class and cut off from the people. As any constituted body would do, it will instinctively seek to extend its powers, to be beyond public control, to impose its own policies and to give priority to its special interests. Having been put in a privileged position, the government is already at odds with the people whose strength it disposes of.”
Errico Malatesta
 
“An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death-penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements—the animals that we call men—will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear."


Leon Trotsky
 
@Karp reminds me of another one:

Peter Kropotkin:

But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: "Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?" we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development and bodily organization.

PK again from a letter to Lenin:

Vladimir Ilyich, your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.
Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? … If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done in the Middle Ages.
I hope you will not answer me that Power is for political men a professional duty, and that any attack against that power must be considered as a threat against which one must guard oneself at any price. This opinion is no longer held even by kings... Are you so blinded, so much a prisoner of your own authoritarian ideas, that you do not realise that being at the head of European Communism, you have no right to soil the ideas which you defend by shameful methods … What future lies in store for Communism when one of its most important defenders tramples in this way every honest feeling?

Allan Bloom:

There are two kinds of openness, the openness of indifference—promoted with the twin purposes of humbling our intellectual pride and letting us be whatever we want to be, just as long as we don’t want to be knowers—and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude, for which history and the various cultures provide a brilliant array of examples for examination.
 
Back
Top