Quotes

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.

The character of a woman does not show itself where love starts but where it ends.

People for the most part pass by the loveliest things in life without paying attention.

Democracy is indispensable to the working class, because only through the exercise of its democratic rights, in the struggle for democracy, can the proletariat become aware of its class interests and its historic task.

The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.

Order prevails in Berlin! You foolish lackeys! Your "order" is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will "rise up again, clashing its weapons," and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing. I was, I am, I shall be!

Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter

Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party - though they are quite numerous - is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of justice, but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when 'freedom' becomes a special privilege.

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.

What presents itself to us as bourgeois legality is nothing but the violence of the ruling class, a violence raised to an obligatory norm from the outset.

My dear, it is very nice here, every day two or three persons are stabbed by soldiers in the city; there are daily arrests, but apart from these it is pretty gay..

Europe, it is true, is a geographical and, within certain limits, an historical cultural conception. But the idea of Europe as an economic unit contradicts capitalist development in two ways. First of all there exist within Europe among the capitalist States - and will so long as these exist - the most violent struggles of competition and antagonisms, and secondly the European States can no longer get along economically without the non-European countries.