Antonio Gramsci Quotes

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters

What comes to pass does so not so much because a few people want it to happen, as because the mass of citizens abdicate their responsibility and let things be.

I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.

To tell the truth is revolutionary.

Indifference is the dead weight of history.

Every State is a dictatorship.

Man is above all else mind, consciousness -- that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.

All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.

Before puberty the child's personality has not yet formed and it is easier to guide its life and make it acquire specific habits of order, discipline, and work.

If you beat your head against the wall, it is your head that breaks and not the wall.

Telling the truth is always revolutionary

The abolition of the class struggle does not mean the abolition of the need to struggle as a principle of development.

Destruction is difficult. It is as difficult as creation.

I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn't know where to die.

Pessimism of the spirit; optimism of the will.

Driving forward is the chief characteristic of western man since the Sumerians. His dread triad of vices is property-holding, voraciousness, and lust.

Common sense is the folklore of philosophy.

History is at once freedom and necessity.

What are the "maximum" limits of acceptance of the term "intellectual"?

My practicality consists in this, in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall - that is my strength, my only strength.

Since defeat in the Struggle must always be envisaged, the preparation of one's own successors is as important as what one does for victory.

Common sense is a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and one can find there anything that one like.

The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned