I am nothing but I must be everything.
Karl MarxRead
Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the crucial role women play in driving social change and progress.
Karl Marx highlights that significant social transformations in history are closely tied to the involvement and upheaval of women. He asserts that the status of women, regardless of their appearance, serves as a metric for measuring societal advancement, indicating that true progress cannot occur without acknowledging and addressing the disparities faced by women.
In practice
In a speech about gender equality, you could use this quote to emphasize the importance of women's contributions to social movements.
I am nothing but I must be everything.
Religion is the opiate of the people.
It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
To be radical is to grasp things by the root.
Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
Everything that was interesting was outside of Poland. Great music, art, film, hippies, Mick Jagger. It was impossible even to dream of escape. I was convinced as a teen-ager that I would have to spend the rest of my life in this trap.
When Superstorm Sandy churned up fourteen-foot walls of water that slammed New York's coastal communities in October 2012, they also washed away any false notions we had that we care sufficiently for poor people.
The map of the world is always changing; sometimes it happens overnight. All it takes is the blink of an eye, the squeeze of a trigger, a sudden gust of wind. Wake up and your life is perched on a precipice; fall asleep, it swallows you whole.
It is not for us to forecast the future, but to shape it.
I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.
I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you’re from or what you did before.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.