History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat.
Interpretation
History teaches us valuable lessons, and revolutions serve as practical experiences for the working class.
This quote emphasizes the importance of historical context as a source of learning. It suggests that understanding history is crucial for realizing the struggles and achievements of the proletariat, while revolutions provide practical knowledge and experience, making them the most effective educational forums for those fighting for change.
In practice
During a speech on social justice, mentioning this quote can highlight the importance of learning from past struggles.
Our scribblings are usually not lyrics but whirrings, without colour or resonance, like the tone of an engine-wheel. I believe that the cause lies in the fact that when people write, they forget for the most part to dig deeply into themselves and to feel the whole import and truth of what they are writing.
The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles...Social democracy...is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh. Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone.
Freedom for supporters of the government only, for members of one party only no matter how big its membership may be is no freedom at all. Freedom is always freedom for the man who thinks differently.
Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone.
The existing legal constitution is nothing but the product of a revolution. Revolution is the act of political creation in the history of classes, while constitutional legislation is the expression of the continual political vegetation of a society.
Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.
How can we expect our children to know and experience the joy of giving unless we teach them that the greater pleasure in life lies in the art of giving rather than receiving.
Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.
Every good journalist is aware that his trade may one day go the way of phrenology-and, what's more, the population will hardly protest the extinction.
Books open windows to the world and have the power to transform lives.
The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.
Instead of becoming a great shikari, as my mother and stepfather might have wished, I had become an incurable bookworm and was to remain one for the rest of my life.
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