Antonio Gramsci Quotations

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

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.

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.

Pessimism of the spirit; optimism of the will.

I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn't know where to die.

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.

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters

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

The philosophy of praxis does not aim at the peaceful resolution of existing contradictions in history and society, but is the very theory of these contradictions. It is not the instrument of government of the dominant groups in order to gain the consent and exercise hegemony over the subaltern classes. It is the expression of subaltern classes who want to educate themselves in the art of government and who have an interest in knowing all truths, even the unpleasant ones, and in avoiding the impossible deceptions of the upper class, and even more their own.

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.

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

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

To tell the truth is revolutionary.

It indicates a person who has not only good manners but who possesses a sense of balance, a sure mastery of himself, a moral discipline that permits him to subordinate voluntarily his own selfish interest to the wider interests of the society in which he lives. The gentleman, therefore is a cultural person in the noblest sense of the word, if by culture we mean not simply wealth of intellectual knowledge but also the ability to fulfil one's duty and understand one's fellow man by respecting / every principle, every opinion, every faith that is sincerely professed.

Indifference is the dead weight of history.

Economy and ideology. The claim (presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism) that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx, the author of concrete political and historical works.

If you think about it seriously, all the questions about the soul and the immortality of the soul and paradise and hell are at bottom only a way of seeing this very simple fact: that every action of ours is passed on to others according to its value, of good or evil, it passes from father to son, from one generation to the next, in a perpetual movement.

Is it better to work out consciously and critically one's own conception of the world and thus, in connection with the labours of one's own brain, choose one's sphere of activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be one's own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the moulding of one' own personality?

A social group can, indeed must, already exercise 'leadership' before winning governmental power (this is indeed one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power); it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to 'lead' as well.

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

I would like you to understand completely, also emotionally, that I'm a political detainee and will be a political prisoner, that I have nothing now or in the future to be ashamed of in this situation. That, at bottom, I myself have in a certain sense asked for this detention and this sentence, because I've always refused to change my opinion, for which I would be willing to give my life and not just remain in prison. That therefore I can only be tranquil and content with myself.

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.

The abolition of the class struggle does not mean the abolition of the need to struggle as a principle of development.

How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one's own parents: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn't this had some effect on my life as a militant--has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?

From the moment when a subordinate class becomes really independent and dominant, calling into being a new type of State, the need arises concretely, of building a new intellectual and moral order, i.e. a new type of society, and hence the need to elaborate the most universal concepts, the most refined and decisive ideological weapons.

This is really the common mentality of prisoners: they read with great attention all the articles that deal with illnesses and send away for treatises and "be your own doctor" or "emergency treatments" and end up by discovering that they have at least 300 or 400 illnesses, whose symptoms they are experiencing.

Revolutionaries see history as a creation of their own spirit, as being made up of a continuous series of violent tugs at the other forces of society - both active and passive, and they prepare the maximum of favourable conditions for the definitive tug (revolution).

Common sense is the folklore of philosophy.

Telling the truth is always revolutionary

Common sense is not something rigid and stationary, but is in continuous transformation, becoming enriched with scientific notions and philosophical opinions that have entered into common circulation. 'Common sense' is the folklore of philosophy and always stands midway between folklore proper (folklore as it is normally understood) and the philosophy, science, and economics of the scientists. Common sense creates the folklore of the future, a relatively rigidified phase of popular knowledge in a given time and place.

Every State is a dictatorship.

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.

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

Destruction is difficult. It is as difficult as creation.

What are the "maximum" limits of acceptance of the term "intellectual"?

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

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...

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.

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.

History is at once freedom and necessity.

Driving forward is the chief characteristic of western man since the Sumerians. His dread triad of vices is property-holding, voraciousness, and lust.

In the life of children there are two very clear-cut phases, before and after puberty. 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: after puberty the personality develops impetuously and all extraneous intervention becomes odious, tyrannical, insufferable. Now it so happens that parents feel the responsibility towards their children precisely during this second period, when it is too late: then of course the stick and violence enter the scene and yield very few results indeed. Why not instead take an interest in the child during the first period?