Antonio Gramsci Quotes

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.

The fact that the young, perceiving themselves at a turning point in history, do not feel at home in the society and wish to change it, is a sign of portentous changes and of the difficult travails within which a new humanity is born.

… the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old.

Revolution by the have-nots has a way of inducing a moral revelation among the haves.

'The Tube' was the first time the plebs had gone on the television. The lunatics taking over the asylum.

The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.

Subordinate classes have usually pushed for democracy, dominant classes nearly always have resisted it.

In every epoch we should endeavor every time to ensure that the historical record is not overwhelmed by conformism …. Those who rule at any given time are the inheritors of all those who have been victorious. On the other hand, the oppressed class should study the picture of its enslaved ancestors rather than its liberated descendants

Human society can only adapt to social change at a certain rate.

The courts, over time, have always responded to the dominant classes in our society.

In a county where power is in the hands of the local tyrants and evil gentry, the magistrate, whoever he may be, is almost invariably a corrupt official. In a county where the peasants have risen there is clean government, whoever the magistrate.

No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

In the course of time, however, the insolence of the nobles … induced the people to rise…. The nobility, to save a portion of their power, were forced to yield a share of it to the people.

The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place.

A sign which almost invariably presages the decadence of an aristocracy is the intrusion of humanitarian feelings and of affected sentimentalizing which render the aristocracy incapable of defending its position.

In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste... would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over all the world.

The history of all hither-to-existing society is the history of class struggles.

One class did not overthrow another; the poor did not supplant the rich. But social relationships—the way people were connected one to another—were changed and decisively so.

Since the third century Christianity has always served simultaneously those who supported the social order and those who wished to overthrow it... .

Everything changes.... Social life changes, and with it the "national question" changes, too. At different periods different classes enter the arena, and each class has its own view of the "national question." Consequently, in different periods the "national question" serves different interests and assumes different shades, according to which class raises it, and when.

Social change … almost inevitably leads to the rise of new political actors demanding a voice and a share of power.

Social stability is ensured, not by the cessation of the demand for change – for the needy and the restless will never cease to cry for it – but by the fact that change in its progress must at last hurt some class of men who are strong enough to arrest it.

No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.

the society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the "objective order of things" (on economic laws, the market etc.).

REVOLUTIONARY: An oppressed person waiting for the opportunity to become an oppressor.