Rose Pastor Stokes Quotes

Don’t look at the one who has somehow chanced to survive but look down into the pit where the millions struggle weakly, and where millions have succumbed.

"Wear a red flower, tonight." And when Grigory Gershuni stood before his vast audience in the evening, and saw Nature flaunting her scarlet beneath the multitude of pale faces raised eagerly for his message; he said: "I wanted you to wear this symbol of the joy and the beauty of life because we demand not only bread, but roses." Yes, Bread and Roses! When the Revolution was successful, did our fellow workers think only of bread? No. Great and terrible as the need was, they lost no time securing to themselves: in the fullest measure possible--Roses! Roses! The flowers of Song, the Dance, the Opera, Drama, the flowers of Science--of Knowledge.

But this surely will not be! Everywhere the workers are awaking to consciousness In Italy the workers forced their Capitalist Government to recall their troops from Russia. The transport workers refused to load the ships with goods or guns for use against Soviet Russia. In France and in England there is an awakening: here too, though less thorough, the protest is being made effective. There are workers everywhere who are refusing to destroy their own Hope of emancipation by destroying the freedom of the Russian Working Class. We are learning that if we rise to power, we rise by Russia, even as Capitalism has learned that it falls if Soviet Russia stands! The Associated Press and the Associated Powers may combine to lie about the Soviet-Government until they make old Annanias sound as truthful by comparison as a wireless message from Moscow. It will help them not one iota. If the Allies' workers stand by Russia, Russia stands--lied about or not. If Russia stands, Capitalism falls and the workers everywhere rise to power.

Surely there is not a capitalist or a well-informed person in the world today who believes that this war is being fought to make the world safe for democracy. It is being fought to make the world safe for capital, so that those who control the industrial machinery of England, France, America, Germany, Russia and Italy can dispose of the overproduction of the workers of those countries in lands less highly organized or not organized at all.

The battle between Science and Superstition is by no means over, but for Science it has been and continues to be a winning fight.

Stand by Russia, Workers of America. Stand by your own cause. The issue is joined; the fight is on. Unite; use your power. For Russia--for ourselves--For Bread and Roses!

We may not do the shooting ourselves, but we are no less guilty if their freedom is lost through the guns we make. Longshoremen load the guns on ships, railroad men bring them to the piers, sailors, workers too; carry them over seas, and soldiers, (also workers) receive them and use them to shoot down Bolshevist workers, (but what workers!) fighting in the front trenches of the world in the cause of the Social Revolution that will set the world's workers free!

Tzars and Empresses, drainers of the people's life-blood are no more! and no more do they "grace" the "royal" box. All space is the people's. They grace the house from pit to gallery. The sparkle of diamonds and precious stones, symbol of tears and slavery, have given place to sparkle of happy eyes, new-lit with the fires of liberty.

Be the penalty what it may, I here frankly offer to give out these slips with the forbidden information to those needy wives and mothers who will frankly come and take them.

we workers are invited, by every subtle blandishment, to join with our capitalist Governments in a war of extermination against our fellow workers of Russia.

When Russia deposed its czar we heard from a great deal of handclapping from the world but what did you hear when the real revolution took place? Not commendation at least. Russia is the threat against industrial serfdom and I have no doubt that there is a gentlemen’s agreement to bleed her to death and then, the capitalistic gentlemen, of, shall we say, any countries, sit around the green table and parcel Russia and the rest of the world into economic spheres, which our workers must slave to maintain.

Frankly, then, I have broken the law over and over, because I believe that since science has shown the way, the mothers of the world should have the power and the right of control birth — to have as many or as few children as the conditions of their health or their particular material environment coupled with a decent standards of living, shall dictate.

Is it possible that according to the law of our economic autocracy to be poor is to be obscene and to have property is not to be obscene? Ah, but these propertyless agitators who are spreading this scientific knowledge among the poor and the propertyless must be suppressed. For it is the business of our greedy capitalist society to prevent the poor from regulating the size of their families

Capitalist society has not succeeded in making me bitter, but it has succeeded in making me unafraid.

We have met here in protest against the law which operates to keep the knowledge of contraception from the mothers of the poor and blinks the fact that the comfortable classes obtain that knowledge from their highly-paid physicians and from one another. We demand that the law which is a dead letter for the rich also become a dead letter for the poor, and declare that we shall continue in ever-increasing numbers to honor this law by breaking it. The poor and they physicians of the [poor], and those who realize the immediate necessity of spreading contraceptive knowledge, will not continue to respect a law that is negatively responsible for so much misery among the masses of the people.