Karl Liebknecht Quotes

And you cannot have a socialist revolution commandeered from the top, ordered around by some omniscient leader or group of leaders.

Social democracy... is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh.

Our party is a party of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletarian revolution is the only solution of the labour problem and all our work must lead to this goal.

The entire press of our propertied class speaks only by permission of the government, becoming silent at the slightest nod. At the present time the whole Russian press is prohibited by the Government not only from speaking on the labor question, but even to publish such words as “labor question” or “proletariat”. The working class only uses the free press it has itself created, regarding it as valuable enough to be worth risking imprisonment for.

The problem is capitalism. The only solution, as difficult as this may be to contemplate at the present time, is socialism.

Socialism makes war upon a system not a class…. Labour should capture power, not destroy it.

The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.

People finally understood that the role of the social-democratic party rests on its conscious leadership of the mass struggle against the existing society, a struggle that must reckon with the vital, necessary conditions of capitalist society.

We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.

If we took over Britain, then we'd have the job of cleaning up the bourgeoisie and keeping people in a revolutionary state of mind.

Whom do I hate most, among all the rabble of to-day?' The Socialist who undermines the workingman's instincts, who destroys his satisfaction with his insignificant existence, who makes him envious and teaches him revenge.”

If the result of so many sacrifices was that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?

A true socialist never hates people. He knows, that they are products of the great economical laws, which in the present society divides man into two nations of poor and rich… We socialists never hate specific individuals. But we hate the system - capitalism, militarism, reaction – and that system we scorn with a healthy, burning, eternal hatred.

Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense.

Fellow workers and peasants, this is the socialist and democratic revolution of the working people, with the working people, and for the working people. And for this revolution of the working people, by the working people, and for the working people we are prepared to give our lives.

Communism … is not a stale state …. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.

In the final account, the fate of our republic will depend upon whether the masses of the peasantry will go hand in hand with the working class

We also know that religion, as the Marxists have always insisted, has, too often, like an opiate, tended to put people to sleep to the reality and the need for the present struggle for peace and justice.

Socialism has not struck root very deeply in the United States, the very heart of the capitalist world, and that the workers there have not yet succeeded in organizing an independent political party on the English model.

Ours is a people's democratic dictatorship, led by the working class and based on the worker-peasant alliance.

In four continents, workers, taking control of their destiny, are building a happy future, are building socialism, communism.

The great leaders called the working class first whenever difficult and gigantic tasks arose for the revolution, and ushered in fresh heydays of the revolution by relying on them.

The present time has one advantage over every other - it is our own.

The UAWK is a mass-based political organization of our socialist agricultural workers which was founded and has developed under the wise guidance of the great leaders, and a reliable transmission belt and peripheral organization of the Party.

Karl Marx was in favor of socialist and communist-socialist revolutions, but he had a pretty nuanced view about it.