ANTONIO GRAMSCI

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

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

To tell the truth is revolutionary.

Pessimism of the spirit; optimism of the will.

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.

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

I'm a political detainee and will be a political prisoner …. 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.

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.

These men no longer see the enemy in the bourgeoisie, they see him in the communists. They are afraid of competition; instead of leaders they have become bankers of men in a monopoly situation, and the least hint of competition makes them crazy with terror and despair.

In the East [Russia] the state was everything. Civil society was primordial and gelatinous. In the West there was a proper relationship between the state and civil society.

The truth is that one cannot choose the form of war one wants.

The conquest of cultural power comes before political power and this is achieved through the concerted action of intellectual ‘organic’ call-outs. Infiltrated into all of the communication, expression, and academic media.

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

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.

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

Indifference is the dead weight of history.

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

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.

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.

Every State is a dictatorship.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.