Rosa Luxemburg Quotes - Page 2

With the true artist, the social formula that he recommends is a matter of secondary importance; the source of his art, its animating spirit, is decisive.

Self-criticism, cruel, unsparing criticism that goes to the very root of the evil, is life and breath for the proletarian movement.

Revolutionary tactics cannot be invented by leaders; they must develop spontaneously-history comes first, leaders' consciousness second.

The self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee. The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility.

The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built.

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. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shootings of hostages, etc.

Only through the conscious action of the working masses in city and country can it be brought to life, only through the people's highest intellectual maturity and inexhaustible idealism can it be brought safely through all storms and find its way to port.

Life is singing also in the sand crunching under the slow and heavy steps of the guards, when we know how to listen to it.

The more that social democracy develops, grows, and becomes stronger, the more the enlightened masses of workers will take their own destinies, the leadership of their movement, and the determination of its direction into their own hands.

The high stage of world-industrial development in capitalistic production finds expression in the extraordinary technical development and destructiveness of the instruments of war.

Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!

The victory of socialism will not descend like fate from heaven.

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.

[Geology] opens up such wide intellectual vistas and supplies a more perfectly unified and more comprehensive conception of nature than any other science.

On the one hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located outside of existing society. On one hand, we have the day-to-day struggle; on the other, the social revolution. It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers by which it is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its mass character; the other, the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of bourgeois social reform.

We stand todaybefore the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, the victory of socialism.

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.

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.

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.