You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying.

Only under conditions of revolutionary crises do you have the highest level of self-organization; this is the Soviet type of organization, which is to say, workers' councils, people's councils, call them what you want, popular committees.

You can have relatively high levels of class consciousness with a lower level of class militancy than one would have expected.

You need a vanguard organization in order to overcome the dangerous potential brought about by the uneven development of class militancy and class consciousness.

The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class.

Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical.

Mistakes in themselves are unavoidable.

The conclusion you can draw from these characteristics is that you have an uneven development of class activity and an uneven development of class consciousness in the working class.

There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time.

Revolution is an instrument, like a party is an instrument.

For us, Marxism is always open because there are always new xperiences, there are always new facts, including facts about the past, which have to be incorporated in the corpus of scientific socialism.

Factions are a sign of illness in a party.

And you cannot have a socialist revolution commandeered from the top, ordered around by some omniscient leader or group of leaders.

The more workers you have in your organization, the better you are implanted in the working class, the more likely you are to come up with the concrete problems of the class.

There has been hardly a single year since 1917, and in a certain sense since 1905, without a revolution somewhere in the world in which the workers participated in a rather important way.

I do not believe in self-proclaimed parties.

There are no conditions in which we subordinate the interests of the class as a whole to the interests of any sect, any chapel, any separate organization.

Socialist democracy is not, a luxury and its need is not limited to the most advanced industrial countries.

You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying.

Workers do not strike every day, they cannot do that the way they function in the capitalist economy. The way they have to live by selling their labor power makes that impossible.

Revolution is not a goal in itself.

On the contrary, history generally confirms that the more conscious and the better you are organized in vanguard organizations, the more constructively you operate in the mass organizations of the working class.

Otherwise we get off the track and we do not fulfil the historical role which we want to fulfil: to help the masses, the exploited and the oppressed of the world, build a classless society, a world socialist federation.

Furthermore, there is absolutely no contradiction between the separate organizations of revolutionary vanguard militants and their participation in the mass organizations of the working class.

Periodically, the workers do revolt against bourgeois society, not by a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand, but by the millions.

We do not believe that the Marxist program, which embodies the continuity of the experience of the actual class struggle and real revolutions of the last one hundred and fifty years, is a definitely closed book.

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.

The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848.

There are not fifty ways of fighting, there's only one, and that's to win. Neither revolution nor war consists in doing what one pleases.

In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals.

Think what a revolution it will be if we manage to get everyone to pay their taxes.

I was born in revolution.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

The revolution is carried out by means of one's thought, not through one's family background.

The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.

Industrialization based on machinery, already referred to as a characteristic of our age, is but one aspect of the revolution that is being wrought by technology.

For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.

The green revolution has an entirely different meaning to most people in the affluent nations of the privileged world than to those in the developing nations of the forgotten world.

The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

Hitler's economic revolution in Germany had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no role in economic or political decisions.

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.

If we don't make earnest moves toward real solutions, then each day we move one day closer to revolution and anarchy in this country. This is the sad, and yet potentially joyous, state of America.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

But the community knew Blade, and everybody but us was shocked at the box office, and subsequently the DVD. That was the beginning of the DVD revolution, and Blade was just like wildfire.

Divine right went out with the American Revolution and doesn't belong to the White House aides. What meat do they eat that makes them grow so great?

The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.