Quotes from Rosa Luxemburg

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

Those who do not move, do not feel their chains.

Lagenliga reformer och revolution är alltså inte olika metoder för historiskt framåtskridande, vilka man kan välja efter behag vid historiens disk, som man gör med varm eller kall korv, utan de utgör olika moment i klassamhällets utveckling.

Instead of comforting the people, who are full of cares and wearied by their hard lives, who go to church with faith in Christianity, the priests fulminate against the workers who are on strike, and against the opponents of the government; further, they exhort them to bear poverty and oppression with humility and patience. They turn the church and the pulpit into a place of political propaganda.

La tendance générale et le résultat final de ce processus sont l'hégémonie universelle de la production capitaliste. Ce terme atteint, le schéma de Marx entre en vigueur : l'accumulation, c'est-à-dire l'expansion ultérieure du capital, devient impossible.

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.

from the moment when the priests use the pulpit as a means of political struggle against the working classes, the workers must fight against the enemies of their rights and their liberation. For he who defends the exploiters and who helps to prolong this present regime of misery, he is the mortal enemy of the proletariat, whether he be in a cassock or in the uniform of the police.

the homemade wisdom of the parliamentary nursery: in order to carry anything, you must first have a majority. The same, they say, applies to revolution: first let's become a "majority." The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority to revolutionary tactics, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority - that is the way the road runs.

A word spoken in Polish has quite a different effect than when spoken in that "foreign" tongue, German.

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...

Geschändet, entehrt, im Blute watend, von Schmutz triefend – so steht die bürgerliche Gesellschaft da, so ist sie. Nicht wenn sie, geleckt und sittsam, Kultur, Philosophie und Ethik, Ordnung, Frieden und Rechtsstaat mimt – als reißende Bestie, als Hexensabbat der Anarchie, als Pesthauch für Kultur und Menschheit –, so zeigt sie sich in ihrer wahren, nackten Gestalt.

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.

Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently.

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.

The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.

What presents itself to us as bourgeois legality is nothing but the violence of the ruling class, a violence raised to an obligatory norm from the outset.

Tomorrow the revolution will 'rise up again, clashing its weapons,' and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!

What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.

Women's freedom is the sign of social freedom.

I want to affect people like a clap of thunder, to inflame their minds with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction and the power of my expression.

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.

I feel at home in the entire world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears

Order prevails in Berlin!" You foolish lackeys! Your "order" is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will "rise up again, clashing its weapons," and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!

I want to burden the conscience of the affluent with all the suffering and all the hidden, bitter tears.