Reactionaries Quotes - Page 8

• The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood.

  Karl Marx

  Country, Character, Feet

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• Learning slowly to not be so reactionary while inserting verbal gratitude into stressful situations is almost like being healed of mental blindness.

  Ann Voskamp

  Gratitude, Stressful Situations, Blindness

  Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.133, Zondervan

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• The continuous war between the reactionary and the progressive forces determine the degree of mankind's happiness.

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Happiness, War, Degrees

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• The life is worth living. It's not true, what the tired and reactionary say. We're not on this earth to suffer and die. We're here to fulfill a mission.

  Joseph Goebbels

  Tired, Suffering, Earth

  "Michael: a German fate in diary notes". Book by Joseph Goebbels, 1926.

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• I come to the categorical conclusion that precisely at this moment we must give battle to the Black Hundred clergy in the most decisive and merciless manner and crush its resistance with
  such brutality that it will not forget it for decades to come. The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for
  this reason, the better.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Crush, Numbers, Giving

  Letter to Comrade Molotov for the Politburo on March 19, 1922. "The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive". Book by Richard Pipes, p. 152-154, 1996.

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• Men who scorn the idea of submission to the divine Will and are outraged by the notion of a God who requires submission are among the first to demand total submission to the process in which we are involved and seem to attach a kind of moral imperative to willing participation in it. Any other attitude, so they say, is reactionary or escapist or anti-social. Perhaps, after all, they have found a divinity to worship; and, if they have, the only charitable comment must be: God help them!

  Charles le Gai Eaton

  Attitude, Men, Ideas

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• TV taste is an aftertaste. Whatever gets on the tube is always a foregone conclusion, a fait accompli. That is, any new ideas or social changes have already been fought for in the real world of the streets, or in the bedroom or even the law courts long before they reach the screen. By the time you see it on prime time, it's usually all over and done with, whatever it was. Television by definition is not avant garde. It is often reactionary and always sentimental.

  Jennifer Stone

  Real, Law Courts, Ideas

  Jennifer Stone (1988). “Mind Over Media: Essays on Film and Television”

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• Aside from rabid Islamists, no one who wishes to be taken seriously can publicly say anything bad about the old Jews of Europe without sounding like reactionary troglodytes.

  Jacob T. Schwartz

  Taken, Europe, Wish

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• Henceforth we will tackle our enemies that come face to face with us and we will not be stabbed in from behind by internal foes. To this end, we will arm the allies and comrades of the broad masses without giving respite to reactionaries, and avenge the blood of our comrades double - and triple - fold.

  Mengistu Haile Mariam

  Blood, Giving, Enemy

  "Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia". Book by Dawit Wolde Giorgis, 1989.

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• There are judges who stretch the law... to suit reactionary attitudes.

  Michael Foot

  Attitude, Law, Judging

  ITV's "People and Politics", May 9, 1974.

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• For new media reactionaries...the problem is technology, the endless distractions of the Internet, the breakdown of authority in an age of blogs and Twitter, the collapse of narrative in a hyper-linked, multi-networked world.

  David L. Ulin

  Technology, Media, Age

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• Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, "taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power." History taught the same to many conservative and reactionary populist movements, whose real attitude to those in power and authority was one of a servile, envious, vicarious adoration.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Attitude, Real, Campaigns

  Christopher Hitchens (2014). “For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports”, p.271, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Country, Hurt, Irrelevance

  Christopher Hitchens (2014). “For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports”, p.253, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Intellectuals range through the finest gradations of kind and quality: from those who are merely educated neurotics, usually with strong hidden reactionary tendencies, through mediocrities of all kinds, to men of real brains and sensibility, more or less stiffened into various respectabilities or substitutes for respectability. The number of Ignorant Specialists is large. The number of hysterics and compulsives is also large.

  Louise Bogan

  Strong, Real, Men

  Louise Bogan (2005). “A poet's prose: selected writings of Louise Bogan : with the uncollected poems”, Swallow Press

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• The Tories had the legal right to demand extra meetings of the council but I could decide when they would be held and always called them for Friday afternoons, knowing that three or four of the richer Tories went to the country early and were not prepared to stay in the city beyond lunchtime. I realised that nothing in politics is new when I read in Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars that Julius Caesar pulled the same trick when reactionaries in the senate were making his life difficult.

  Ken Livingstone

  Friday, Country, Cities

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• Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz.

  Ken Livingstone

  Cutting, Racism, Movement

  "This Is About Israel, Not Anti-Semitism". www.theguardian.com. March 04, 2005.

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• Indeed, some "revolutionaries" brand as "innocents," "dreamers," or even "reactionaries"; those who would challenge this educational practice. But one does not liberate people by alienating them. Authentic liberation - the process of humanization - is not another deposit to be made in men.

  Paulo Freire

  Educational, Men, Practice

  Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.56, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• When our party took over political power, the exploiting classes and reactionary forces went into action. The only rusty and antiquated tool that they use against us is preaching in the name of faith and religion against the progressive movement of our homeland... They ought to be uprooted as a cancerous tumor is from the body of a patient in a surgical operation.

  Nur Muhammad Taraki

  Party, Class, Names

  "Taraki: 'A New World, A New Man, And A New Society'". Executive Intelligence Review Vol. 5, No. 30, www.larouchepub.com. September 12, 1978.

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• We come humbly to say to the men in the forefront of our government that the civil rights issue is not an Ephemeral, evanescent domestic issue that can be kicked about by reactionary guardians of the status quo; it is rather an eternal moral issue which may well determine the destiny of our nation in the ideological struggle with communism. The hour is late. The clock of destiny is ticking out. We must act now, before it is too late.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Struggle, Destiny, Men

  "The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume IV: Symbol of the Movement, January 1957-December 1958". Book by Martin Luther King, Clayborne Carson, Peter Holloran, Ralph Luker, Penny A. Russell (University of California Press), p. 211, 1992.

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• All the experience the Chinese people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people's democratic dictatorship, that is, to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right.

  Mao Zedong

  People, Chinese, Speak

  Zedong Mao (1971). “Mao Tse-tung: An Anthology of His Writings”

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• I think the big tragedy of the Cuban Revolution was that it became dependent on the Soviet Union, and it became dependent on the Soviet Union under a very reactionary bureaucratic regime led by Leonid Brezhnev.

  Tariq Ali

  Thinking, Tragedy, Unions

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit. Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.

  Louis Kronenberger

  Men, Ice Cream, Law

  "Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life". Book by Louis Kronenberger, 1954.

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• We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didnt walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.

  Saul Williams

  Race, Ideas, Black

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• Any man who stands for progress has to criticize, disbelieve and challenge every item of the old faith. Item by item he has to reason out every nook and corner of the prevailing faith. If after considerable reasoning one is led to believe in any theory or philosophy, his faith is welcomed. His reasoning can be mistaken, wrong, misled and sometimes fallacious. But he is liable to correction because reason is the guiding star of his life. But mere faith and blind faith is dangerous: it dulls the brain, and makes a man reactionary.

  Bhagat Singh

  Stars, Philosophy, Believe

  S. Irfan Habib, Bhagat Singh (2007). “To make the deaf hear: ideology and programme of Bhagat Singh and his comrades”

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• Ginger Rogers was one of the worst, red-baiting, terrifying reactionaries in Hollywood.

  Joseph Losey

  Red, Hollywood, Roger

  Joseph Losey, Michel Ciment (1985). “Conversations with Losey”, Methuen Publishing

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