Quotes from Antonio Gramsci

Man is above all else mind, consciousness -- that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.

Common sense is the folklore of philosophy.

The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.

Indifference is the dead weight of history.

History is at once freedom and necessity.

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.

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

State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armor of coercion.

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

To tell the truth is revolutionary.

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 is at once freedom and necessity.

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

The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned

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

Pessimism of the spirit; 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.

Man is above all else mind, consciousness -- that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

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

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

The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilisations.

Ideas and opinions are not spontaneously "born" in each individual brain: they have had a centre of formation, or irradiation, of dissemination, of persuasion-a group of men, or a single individual even, which has developed them and presented them in the political form of current reality.