Antonio Gramsci

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

To tell the truth is revolutionary.

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

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

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

Indifference is the dead weight of history.

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

Common sense is the folklore of philosophy.

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.

We need to free ourselves from the habit of seeing culture as encyclopedia knowledge, and men as mere receptacles to be stuffed full of empirical data and a mass of unconnected raw facts, which have to be filed in the brain as in the columns of a dictionary, enabling their owner to respond to the various stimuli from the outside world.

Some whimper piously, others curse obscenely, but nobody, or very few ask themselves: If I had tried to impose my will, would this have happened? I also hate the indifferent because of that: because their whimpering of eternally innocent ones annoys me.

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.

History teaches, but it has no pupils.

This phrase isn't my own; it's from the pen of French writer Romain Rolland. But people credit me with having said it all the time—so frequently, in fact, that I might as well have said it myself.

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

I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent.

Every State is a dictatorship.

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.