Top 41 Gramsci Quotes
#1. To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, cynicism of intellect; promise of the present.
Bill Grigsby
#3. Density, complexity, and historical-semantic value that is so strong as to make politics possible ... Gramsci's insight is to have recognised that subordination, fracturing, diffusion, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding, are necessary aspects of elaboration.
Edward Said
#4. What comes to pass does so not so much because a few people want it to happen, as because the mass of citizens abdicate their responsibility and let things be.
Antonio Gramsci
#5. The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.
Antonio Gramsci
#6. The brain is not nourished on beans and truffles but rather the food manages to reconstitute the molecules of the brain once it has been turned into homogeneous and assimilable substances, which potentially have the "same nature", as the molecules of the brain
Antonio Gramsci
#8. One must speak for a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality
Antonio Gramsci
#10. Since defeat in the Struggle must always be envisaged, the preparation of one's own successors is as important as what one does for victory.
Antonio Gramsci
#11. Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. ... In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.
Antonio Gramsci
#12. I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.
Antonio Gramsci
#13. It is in their interests to have a stable, skilled labour force, a permanently well-adjusted complex, because the human complex (the collective worker) of an enterprise is also a machine which cannot, without considerable loss, be taken to pieces too often and renewed with single new parts.
Antonio Gramsci
#15. The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters
Antonio Gramsci
#16. 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.
Antonio Gramsci
#17. Common sense is a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and one can find there anything that one like.
Antonio Gramsci
#18. Before puberty the child's personality has not yet formed and it is easier to guide its life and make it acquire specific habits of order, discipline, and work ...
Antonio Gramsci
#19. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born
Antonio Gramsci
#20. I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn't know where to die.
Antonio Gramsci
#21. 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.
Antonio Gramsci
#22. I give culture this meaning: exercise of thought, acquisition of general ideas, habit of connecting causes and effects ... I believe that it means thinking well, whatever one thinks, and therefore acting well, whatever one does.
Antonio Gramsci
#23. The abolition of the class struggle does not mean the abolition of the need to struggle as a principle of development.
Antonio Gramsci
#24. After puberty the personality develops impetuously and all extraneous intervention becomes odious ... Now it so happens that parents feel the responsibility towards their children precisely during this second period, when it is too late.
Antonio Gramsci
#25. All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals
Antonio Gramsci
#27. Man is above all else mind, consciousness
that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.
Antonio Gramsci
#28. I live, I am partisan. This is why I hate those who do not take sides; I hate those who are indifferent
Antonio Gramsci
#29. The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself'as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.
Antonio Gramsci
#31. If you beat your head against the wall, it is your head that breaks and not the wall.
Antonio Gramsci
#32. Driving forward is the chief characteristic of western man since the Sumerians. His dread triad of vices is property-holding, voraciousness, and lust.
Antonio Gramsci
#34. Destruction is difficult. It is as difficult as creation.
Antonio Gramsci
#35. The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned
Antonio Gramsci
#36. The popular element "feels" but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element "knows" but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel.
Antonio Gramsci
#37. The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.
Antonio Gramsci
#38. The people themselves are not a homogeneous cultural collectivity but present numerous and variously combined cultural stratifications which, in their pure form, cannot always be identified within specific historical popular collectivities.
Antonio Gramsci
#40. 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.
Antonio Gramsci
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