26 Quotes by Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci is an Italian Marxist philosopher and politician who is well known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which explains how dominant groups use culture to maintain their power. Gramsci was a key figure in the Italian communist movement and was imprisoned by the fascist regime for much of his life. While in prison, he wrote extensively on Marxism, politics, and culture, and his ideas have had a significant impact on critical theory and cultural studies. Gramsci’s work emphasizes the role of intellectuals in shaping public opinion and the need for popular education to promote social change. (Bio)
Antonio Gramsci Quotes
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters (Meaning)
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.
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.
I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.
The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.
The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.
To tell the truth is revolutionary. (Meaning)
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born
Indifference is the dead weight of history.
Every State is a dictatorship.
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
Man is above all else mind, consciousness — that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.
All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.
If you beat your head against the wall, it is your head that breaks and not the wall.
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.
Telling the truth is always revolutionary
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.
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).
The abolition of the class struggle does not mean the abolition of the need to struggle as a principle of development.
Destruction is difficult. It is as difficult as creation.
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.
I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn’t know where to die.
Pessimism of the spirit; optimism of the will.
Driving forward is the chief characteristic of western man since the Sumerians. His dread triad of vices is property-holding, voraciousness, and lust.
Common sense is the folklore of philosophy.
History is at once freedom and necessity.
― Antonio Gramsci Quotes
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Tal Gur is an impact-driven creator at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 life goals around the globe. Tal's journey and recent book, The Art of Fully Living, inspired him to found Elevate Society.
