Quotes About Rosa Luxemburg

#1. Rosa Luxemburg was - still is for me - a great personal and intellectual heroine. Her analysis of Leninism and capitalism and social democracy are all worth reading. I wouldn't consider anyone truly politically literate if they hadn't given her work at least some study.

Christopher Hitchens

#2. Rosa Luxemburg maintained that the capitalist system can keep up its rate of investment (and therefore its profits) only so long as it is expanding geographically.

Joan Robinson

#3. The notes for Rosa Luxemburg were found next to his body.

Wallace Steadman Watson

#4. Women's freedom is the sign of social freedom. Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg

#5. The most revolutionary act is a clear view of the world as it really is.

Rosa Luxemburg

#6. It is in the tiny struggles of individual peoples that the great movements of history are most truly revealed.

Rosa Luxemburg

#7. [Geology] opens up such wide intellectual vistas and supplies a more perfectly unified and more comprehensive conception of nature than any other science.

Rosa Luxemburg

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

Rosa Luxemburg

#9. Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat.

Rosa Luxemburg

#10. Self-criticism, cruel, unsparing criticism that goes to the very root of the evil, is life and breath for the proletarian movement.

Rosa Luxemburg

#11. Social democracy ... is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh.

Rosa Luxemburg

#12. Life is singing also in the sand crunching under the slow and heavy steps of the guards, when we know how to listen to it.

Rosa Luxemburg

#13. 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.

Rosa Luxemburg

#14. Marxism must abhor nothing so much as the possibility that it becomes congealed in its current form. It is at its best when butting heads in self-criticism, and in historical thunder and lightning, it retains its strength.

Rosa Luxemburg

#15. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built.

Rosa Luxemburg

#16. 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.

Rosa Luxemburg

#17. We stand todaybefore the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, the victory of socialism.

Rosa Luxemburg

#18. Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters.

Rosa Luxemburg

#19. Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party - though they are quite numerous - is no freedom at all.

Rosa Luxemburg

#20. The victory of socialism will not descend like fate from heaven.

Rosa Luxemburg

#21. There is no democracy without socialism, and no socialism without democracy.

Rosa Luxemburg

#22. Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it is seen as having been inevitable.

Rosa Luxemburg

#23. My dear, it is very nice here, every day two or three persons are stabbed by soldiers in the city; there are daily arrests, but apart from these it is pretty gay..

Rosa Luxemburg

#24. Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.

Rosa Luxemburg

#25. Those who don't move don't notice their chains.

Rosa Luxemburg

#26. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!

Rosa Luxemburg

#27. Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter

Rosa Luxemburg

#28. Marxism is a revolutionary worldview that must always struggle for new revelations.

Rosa Luxemburg

#29. Only to the rude ear of one who is quite indifferent does the song of a bird seem always the same.

Rosa Luxemburg

#30. The more that social democracy develops, grows, and becomes stronger, the more the enlightened masses of workers will take their own destinies, the leadership of their movement, and the determination of its direction into their own hands.

Rosa Luxemburg

#31. Freedom for supporters of the government only, for members of one party only no matter how big its membership may be is no freedom at all. Freedom is always freedom for the man who thinks differently.

Rosa Luxemburg

#32. I know thy works, that thou are neither cold nor hot; I would that thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.

Rosa Luxemburg

#33. Only through the conscious action of the working masses in city and country can it be brought to life, only through the people's highest intellectual maturity and inexhaustible idealism can it be brought safely through all storms and find its way to port.

Rosa Luxemburg

#34. Revolutionary tactics cannot be invented by leaders; they must develop spontaneously-history comes first, leaders' consciousness second.

Rosa Luxemburg

#35. History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat.

Rosa Luxemburg

#36. The clergy, no less than the capitalist class, lives on the backs of the people, profits from the degradation, the ignorance and the oppression of the people.

Rosa Luxemburg

#37. We will be victorious if we have not forgotten how to learn.

Rosa Luxemburg

#38. Capitalism, as a result of its own inner contradictions, moves toward a point when it will be unbalanced, when it will simply become impossible.

Rosa Luxemburg

#39. 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!

Rosa Luxemburg

#40. Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently.

Rosa Luxemburg

#41. Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone.

Rosa Luxemburg

#42. The sorry existence to which this mental tendency was condemned in recent decades by the powerful development of social democracy in Germany may, to a certain extent, be explained by the exclusive domination and long duration of the parliamentary period. A

Rosa Luxemburg

#43. 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.

Rosa Luxemburg

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

Rosa Luxemburg

#45. The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles.

Rosa Luxemburg

#46. With the true artist, the social formula that he recommends is a matter of secondary importance; the source of his art, its animating spirit, is decisive.

Rosa Luxemburg

#47. Rosa reports the engagement of her niece in 1912 to a nice young man without a name. It may therefore be that the last descendants of the Luxemburg family are living somewhere in England.

John Peter Nettl

#48. The masses are in reality their own leaders, dialectically creating their own development process.

Rosa Luxemburg