Rosa Luxemburg Quotes

Being human means throwing your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be, all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud.

Only the hammer blow of revolution, that is to say, the conquest of political power by the proletariat can break down [the] wall [between capitalist society and Socialist society].

I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.

The Leninist agrarian reform has created a new and powerful layer of popular enemies of socialism on the countryside, enemies whose resistance will be much more dangerous and stubborn than that of the noble large landowners.

Again, everyone knows how the priests themselves make profit from the worker, extract money out of him on the occasion of marriage, baptism or burial. How often has it happened that the priest, called to the bedside of a sick man to administer the last sacraments, refused to go there before he had been paid his “fee”? The worker goes away in despair, to sell or pawn his last possession, so as to be able to give religious consolation to his kindred.

All the errors of this school rest precisely on the conception that mistakes the phenomena of competition, as seen from the angle of the isolated capitalist, for the phenomena of the whole of capitalist economy.

[...] La lotta per il socialismo può essere combattuta soltanto dalle masse, immediatamente petto contro petto con il capitalismo, in ogni impresa, da ogni proletario contro il suo imprenditore. Solo allora sarà una rivoluzione socialista. Certo coloro che non pensano si rappresentavano diversamente il corso delle cose: si credeva che sarebbe stato necessario soltanto rovesciare il governo e porre in sua vece un governo socialista, poi si sarebbero emanati i decreti che instauravano il socialismo. Anche questa non era che un'illusione. Il socialismo non si fa e non può esser fatto mediante decreti, neppure da un governo socialista caratterizzato. Il socialismo dev'esser fatto dalle masse, da ciascun proletario. Là dove essi sono legati alla catena del capitale, la deve essere spezzata la catena. Solo questo è il socialismo, solo così il socialismo può essere attuato.

Freiheit, ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden

The Bolsheviks themselves will not want, with hand on heart, to deny that, step by step, they have to feel out the ground, try out, experiment, test now one way now another, and that a good many of their measures do not represent priceless pearls of wisdom. Thus it must and will be with all of us when we get to the same point–even if the same difficult circumstances may not prevail everywhere.

"We have known for a long time that the petit-bourgeois reformer finds "good" and "bad" sides in everything."

Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter

Fourier's scheme of changing, by means of phalansteries, the water of all the seas into tasty lemonade was surely a phantastic idea. But Bernstein, proposing to change the sea of capitalist bitterness into a sea of socialist sweetness, by progressively pouring into it bottles of social reformist lemonade, presents an idea that is merely more insipid but no less phantastic.

Clearly, not uncritical apologetics but penetrating and thoughtful criticism is alone capable of bringing out the treasures of experiences and teachings.

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 modern proletarian class doesn't carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight... That's exactly what is laudable about it, that's exactly why this colossal piece of culture, within the modern workers' movement, is epoch-defining: that the great masses of the working people first forge from their own consciousness, from their own belief, and even from their own understanding the weapons of their own liberation.