Vacant Handle > Vacant's Quotes

“While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.”
― Vladimir Lenin, Estado y revolución

“Placing altogether too much faith in my own stiff-necked will made me retreat far from you, because I loved my paths and not yours, because I was in love with the “freedom” of a runaway slave.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“The difference between treason and patriotism is only a matter of dates.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament - such is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarianism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.”
― Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution

“It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future

“The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.”
― Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution

“Under capitalism democratism is restricted, cramped, curtailed, mutilated by all the conditions of wage slavery and of the poverty and misery of the masses”
― Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution

“Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich: this is the democratism of capitalist society.”
― Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution

“The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future

“It's necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“All human wisdom is contained in these two words - Wait and Hope”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Anything that you might have to say to me will never be worth what I can read in your eyes, what your heart has thought and mine felt. Like a benefactor in a novel, I should have left without seeing you again”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“The mass of anything is less in one part than it is in the whole; and if the mass is infinite, then it’s less in any part that’s set off within a definite space than in its full, boundless extent. It’s not whole everywhere, like a spirit, like God. I had no idea whatsoever as to what could be within us to make it possible for us to be, and to be correctly described in scripture, as made in the image of God.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Competition permits the capitalist to deduct from the price of labour power that which the family earns from its own little garden or field; the workers are compelled to accept any piece wages offered to them, because otherwise they would get nothing at all, and they could not live from the products of their small-scale agriculture alone, and because, on the other hand, it is just this agriculture and landownership which chains them to the spot and prevents them from looking around for other employment.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question

“Private property based on the labour of the small proprietor, free competition, democracy, i.e., all the catchwords with which the capitalists and their press deceive the workers and the peasants- are things of the past. Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world by a handful of "advanced" countries. And this "booty" is shared between two or three powerful world marauders armed to the teeth"..."who involve the whole world in their war over the sharing of their booty.”
― Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

“But suppose, for the sake of argument, free competition, without any sort of monopoly, would develop capitalism trade more rapidly. Is it not a fact that the more rapidly trade and capitalism develop, the greater is the concentration of production and capital which gives rise to monopoly?”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism: a popular outline

“To say that "the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capital", means only this: that the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs which fall to him, the greater will be the number of workers than can be called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent upon capital be increased.”
― Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

“But capital not only lives upon labour. Like a master, at once distinguished and barbarous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises.”
― Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

“The labourer seeks to maintain the total of his wages for a given time by performing more labour, either by working a greater number of hours, or by accomplishing more in the same number of hours. Thus, urged on by want, he himself multiplies the disastrous effects of division of labour. The result is: the more he works, the less wages he receives. And for this simple reason: the more he works, the more he competes against his fellow workmen, the more he compels them to compete against him, and to offer themselves on the same wretched conditions as he does so that, in the last analysis, he competes against himself as a member of the working class.”
― Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

“This false appearance distinguishes wages labour from other historical forms of labour. On the basis of the wages system even the unpaid labour seems to be paid labour. With the slave, on the contrary, even that part of his labour which is paid appears to be unpaid. Of course, in order to work the slave must live, and one part of his working day goes to replace the value of his own maintenance. But since no bargain is struck between him and his master, and no acts of selling and buying are going on between the two parties, all his labour seems to be given away for nothing.”
― Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

“To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.”
― Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

“Even extreme grief may ultimately vent
itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

[These words are also inscribed upon his grave]”
― Karl Marx, Eleven Theses on Feuerbach