Rosa Luxemburg Quotes

Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.

There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions. But there is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.

Life doesn't just happen; it's constructed through the history of power. And that's something I am interested in and so is the art world: a world that's trying to engage socially, with a leftist slant, to work out how we got here.

One thing I've learned over these last 30 or 40 years is that people make history. There's no fait accompli to any of this.

Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation.

Political, social and economic realities are shaped by a historical process.

Historical truth is that, and that alone, which reveals the forces that go to mold the social life of mankind.

The enemy is the system. And the system is made up of people, and we have a choice in that.

There are no inevitabilities in history

History is at once freedom and necessity.

Does our hand show in this?

Freedom is the recognition of necessity

The class struggle, to which Marx has specially drawn attention, is a real factor, the tokens of which are to be found on every page of history. But the struggle is not confined only to two classes: the proletariat and the capitalist; it occurs between an infinite number of groups with different interests, and above all between the elites contending for power. The existence of these groups may vary in duration, they may be based on permanent or more or less temporary characteristics. In the most savage peoples, and perhaps in all, sex determines two of these groups.

The state, and a certain form of politics from above, take control of the Women’s Movement by bribing individual members…. The trap is to allow one woman to rise and enjoy the fruits of the struggle of many.

Political history is not a sequence of incoherent and haphazard events but a chain of causes and effects.

There are .. two choices: obedience to institutional authority or radical dissent from it.

Our movement took a grip on cowardly Marxism

Nothing is inevitable in history.

One of the frustrating tics of our society's progressive vanguard is the assumption that every evil it discovers was entirely invisible in the past, that this generation is the first to wrestle with dominance and cruelty.

So persuasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences but actually our sense of possibilities.

Power, privilege, and violence are not, and never were, strictly Southern issues in America.

To be located in society means to be at the intersection point of specific social forces. Commonly one ignores these forces one also knows that there is not an awful lot that one can do about this.

If every man could act as he chose, the whole of history would be a tissue of disconnected accidents.

Historical capitalism is a materialist civilization.