I am nothing but I must be everything.
Karl MarxRead
Every provisional political set-up following a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that.
Interpretation
Revolutions often necessitate a strong, authoritarian government to maintain order and implement changes.
In this quote, Karl Marx suggests that after a revolution, the establishment of a new political order is often accompanied by the need for a dictatorship. This dictatorship, characterized by decisive and vigorous leadership, is seen as essential for stabilizing the newly formed government and ensuring that the revolutionary ideals are effectively realized and safeguarded from counter-revolutionary forces.
In practice
This quote can be used in a political debate to highlight the necessity of strong authority during transitions.
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.
They are longing for a war with Iran. Iran is no more a harm to us than was Iraq or Afghanistan. They invented an enemy, they tell lies, lies, lies. The New York Times goes along with their lies, lies, lies. And they don't stop. When the public that's lied to 30 times a day it's apt to believe the lies, is not it?
Presidential ambition is a disease that can only be cured by embalming fluid.
I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.
If we insist that public life be reserved for those whose personal history is pristine, we are not going to get paragons of virtue running our affairs. We will get the very rich, who contract out the messy things in life the very dull, who have nothing to hide and nothing to show and the very devious, expert at covering their tracks and ambitious enough to risk their discovery.
Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses."
It is a government by the corporations, for the corporations.
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