Prison Notebooks Quotes

“Education is a struggle against instincts which are linked to elemental biological functions, a struggle against nature, in order to dominate it and create man immersed within his own time.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere I

“La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere I

“[Common sense] is a spontaneous set of beliefs which together express a conception of the world which takes the social order as ‘the way things are.’ It is apparently the ‘spontaneous feelings’ that people have, the traditional popular conception of the world – what is unimaginatively called “instinct” although it too is in fact a primitive and elementary historical acquisition.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks: Volume I