Rosa Luxemburg Quotes

Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters.

The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.

Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party—though they are quite numerous—is no freedom at all.

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.

Society is an organism of mutually dependent parts and none of them can be touched without affecting the whole.

The most decisive factor for the advent of a revolutionary mode of action was the realization that the working class could no longer extend its economic power without its political power.

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

Social Democracy is the sheep’s clothing in which a wolf, the specter of capitalism, masquerades.

The unions are indispensable institutions of the proletarian class struggle.

Socialism is the first popular movement in world history that has set itself the goal of bringing human consciousness, and thereby free will, into play in the social actions of mankind.

The contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois society increasingly take up the form of a struggle between productive forces and social bond on the one hand, and the forms of production on the other.

Rosa Luxemburg Quotes part 2

Only when life has become completely impossible in the old form will the new form have been found.

Reactionary democracy to restrain the development of the mass revolutionary movement is one thing, and it can always find recruits in the camp of the disheartened and the conquered.

Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.

Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently.

The factory is the perfect exemplification of the purely mechanical dividing up of labor, the cementing together of value-creating labor and surplus labor, the industrial museums and kindergartens.

The creation of an independent, vigorously active, broad democratic mass party, is our first and highest task.

Destruction is omnipresent, in Law as in Military Science.

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him.

Perseverance acquired through strength, through self-confidence, through a readiness to struggle—perseverance that will instantly put its energies to use when the moment of peril has come, that will also inspire at every moment a knowledge and recognition of the forces gathered on his side.

Without a general uprising of the people, or at least of the workers, the government can do nothing but collapse, no matter how devastating the measures that it may take.

It is a question of organizing the entire mass of the proletariat for the struggle for proletarian rule.

The vital necessity of cleansing the socialist consciousness of the narrowed, petty bourgeois content of the world is convincingly demonstrated by the tragic fiasco of The Commune.

Subjection of society to the capitalist mode of production is apparent in the creation of a few millionaire capitalists and hundreds of thousands of proletarians, exploited, oppressed, compelled to sell themselves, to slave for a bare existence, subjected to every kind of hardship.

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

The most important thing and the task of the Social Democracy was to bring about the revolutionary energy of the proletariat and to formulate a political will.

We have failed to impose our will upon the situation and to make our will prevail.

The freedom of all is essential to my own freedom.

The accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time the accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.

To offset the constant grinding exploitation, embezzlement, oppression, and robbery of generations of workers, there are only these forms—slump, despair, destitution, misery.

Peace in its purity is nothing more than the revolutionary inspiration.

A new era of true freedom has found its compass point 65 million longo-meters from our nostrils; well may it be called the ’70 Reformation.

The double role of woman, always progressing further from the guardianship of the salomonia to the guardianship of death, merely reinforces the lasting total dominance of man over woman.

All the… talk about the supposed jealousy of man toward woman, about the alleged authority given to the man over woman… is the shabbiest, commonest humbug, a saturated solution of cruelty in which zero point four is nothing but a kind of buffeting yourself.

Only an act of true humanity, of true craftsmanship, of true expression, free of all second-hand customs and laws, will endure, achieving salvation from the hollow womb between two perversions of reality.

Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

Bourgeois… jabber about right and duty, about the best example, while skulls were being split.

Never underestimate the power of a few committed individuals to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Capitalism is a giant, brutal machine that must be dismantled if humanity is to survive.

The liberation of the workers will only be accomplished through the united actions of the working class, the backbone of society.

War is the ultimate expression of the capitalist system’s inhumanity and greed.

Without a revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.

The strength of the working class lies in its unity and solidarity.

The goal of socialism is the collective ownership and control over the means of production.

The working class has nothing to lose but its chains and a world to win.

The struggle for socialism is the struggle for true equality and justice.

The ruling class will always defend their privilege and power by any means necessary.

Revolution is not a question of changing the playing field, but of changing the game altogether.

The capitalist system thrives on inequality and exploitation; socialism seeks to eradicate both.

The fight for justice and equality is a constant battle; the struggle must always continue.