Antonio Gramsci: Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhe...

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

Antonio Gramsci

dying struggle 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.

Antonio Gramsci

responsibility doe people

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

Antonio Gramsci

life-changing optimistic inspirational

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

Antonio Gramsci

knowledge-and-power diversity dying

The philosophy of praxis does not aim at the peaceful resolution of existing contradictions in history and society, but is the very theory of these contradictions. It is not the instrument of government of the dominant groups in order to gain the consent and exercise hegemony over the subaltern classes. It is the expression of subaltern classes who want to educate themselves in the art of government and who have an interest in knowing all truths, even the unpleasant ones, and in avoiding the impossible deceptions of the upper class, and even more their own.

Antonio Gramsci

exercise philosophy art

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

Antonio Gramsci

illusion becoming challenges

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

Antonio Gramsci

beats wall break

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

Antonio Gramsci

function men

To tell the truth is revolutionary.

Antonio Gramsci

truth-is revolutionary telling-the-truth

Common sense is not something rigid and stationary, but is in continuous transformation, becoming enriched with scientific notions and philosophical opinions that have entered into common circulation. 'Common sense' is the folklore of philosophy and always stands midway between folklore proper (folklore as it is normally understood) and the philosophy, science, and economics of the scientists. Common sense creates the folklore of the future, a relatively rigidified phase of popular knowledge in a given time and place.

Antonio Gramsci

common-sense philosophical philosophy

Every State is a dictatorship.

Antonio Gramsci

dictatorship states

One must speak for a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality

Antonio Gramsci

struggle feelings reality

It indicates a person who has not only good manners but who possesses a sense of balance, a sure mastery of himself, a moral discipline that permits him to subordinate voluntarily his own selfish interest to the wider interests of the society in which he lives. The gentleman, therefore is a cultural person in the noblest sense of the word, if by culture we mean not simply wealth of intellectual knowledge but also the ability to fulfil one's duty and understand one's fellow man by respecting / every principle, every opinion, every faith that is sincerely professed.

Antonio Gramsci

selfish men mean

Indifference is the dead weight of history.

Antonio Gramsci

indifference weight

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born

Antonio Gramsci

dying inspirational facts

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

Antonio Gramsci

consciousness mind men

A social group can, indeed must, already exercise 'leadership' before winning governmental power (this is indeed one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power); it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to 'lead' as well.

Antonio Gramsci

groups winning exercise

Telling the truth is always revolutionary

Antonio Gramsci

truth-is revolutionary telling-the-truth

I give culture this meaning: exercise of thought, acquisition of general ideas, habit of connecting causes and effects ... I believe that it means thinking well, whatever one thinks, and therefore acting well, whatever one does.

Antonio Gramsci

exercise mean believe

From the moment when a subordinate class becomes really independent and dominant, calling into being a new type of State, the need arises concretely, of building a new intellectual and moral order, i.e. a new type of society, and hence the need to elaborate the most universal concepts, the most refined and decisive ideological weapons.

Antonio Gramsci

independent class order

Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.