Czeslaw Milosz Quotes

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

All past history with the exception of the primitive stages was the history of class struggles.

Race, class, and gender in our heritage, in our history as people of America, have intermingled and interpenetrated in dazzling, complex, destructive, and empowering ways. Figuring these ways out constitutes a major preoccupation of the discipline of history.

All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas — and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists.

Karl Marx is not a very popular figure any more but once in a while he said something very sensible.

The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future

Marxist ideology is wrong, but I have known many good people who are Marxists.

Marxism is the opium of the Marxists.

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.

Reagan himself, for much of his life, was devoted against the elites. His antagonism to the Soviet Union is antagonism against oppression by the elites of the many.

I would say I was still a Marxist - which is not to be confused with being a Communist. Despite its flaws, Marxism still seems to explain the material world better than anything else.

The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.

Communists are great capitalists, so there is no threat anymore.

Marxism is a revolutionary worldview that must always struggle for new revelations.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

Of course, Marxism is an example of what Carl Popper would have called a 'World Three' structure, in that it's got immense power as an idea, but you couldn't actually hold up anything in the world and say: 'this is Marxism'.

All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.

I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

My first encounter with Marx's writings came very early in life, as a result of the strange times I grew up in, with Greece exiting the nightmare of the neofascist dictatorship of 1967-74.

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

Too often we shape our public positions on the basis of our economic connections. That brings us dangerously close to economic determinism.

I think politics can no longer be assigned to parliamentary activity and it probably never could be. But politics with a small p and the history of trade union movement really interests me.

The two great cultural and political currents of Italy have always only been concerned with the masses.