Quotes of the left

Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one's own and that of other people.
-- Trotsky, The Struggle for Cultured Speech (1923)

Communism now no longer meant the concoction, by means of the imagination, of an ideal society as perfect as possible, but insight into the nature, the conditions and the consequent general aims of the struggle waged by the proletariat.
-- Engels, On the History of the Communist League (1885)

Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people.
-- Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)

I am ambitious for humanity: I should like that everyone were an artist, sufficiently poetic that all human vanity would disappear.
-- Louise Michelle

Workers of the World, Unite!
-- Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)

A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.
-- Karl Marx

"Guerrillaism" was the military expression of the peasant background of the revolution.
-- Trotsky, Preface to the Military Writings (1923)

In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.
-- "Mao Zedong On Practice," (July 1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 296.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.
-- Karl Marx

The leaders of the petty bourgeoisie 'must teach the people to trust the bourgeoisie. The proletarians must teach the people to distrust the bourgeoisie.
-- V I Lenin, The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution (1917)

The seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue by war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution.
-- Mao Zedong, Problems of War and Strategy (1938)

Patriotism is in political life what faith is in religion.
-- Lord Acton in 'Nationality', in The Home and Foreign Review (July 1862).

The army must become one with the people so that they see it as their own army. Such an army will be invincible....
-- "On Protracted War" (May 1938), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 186.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
-- Karl Marx

Every Communist working in the mass movements should be a friend of the masses and not a boss over them, an indefatigable teacher and not a bureaucratic politician.
-- "The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War" (October 1938), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. II.

Dialectics as living, many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades of every approach and approximation to reality (with a philosophical system growing into a whole out of each shade)
-- Lenin, Summary of Dialectics (1914)

The most violent element in society is ignorance.
-- Emma Goldman

In general it is always empirical businessmen we are talking about when we refer to political economists, (who represent) their scientific creed and form of existence.
-- Marx, Human Requirements and Division of Labour (1844)

We can learn what we did not know. We are not only good at destroying the Old World, we are also good at building the new.
-- "Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China" (March 5, 1949), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. IV, p. 374.

The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.
-- Trotsky, What Next for the German Revolution? (1932)

While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
-- Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 4 (1867)

It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first Chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!
-- Lenin, Conspectus of Hegel's Logic (1914)

The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.
-- Peter Kropotkin

We must give a scientific explanation of society, and clearly explain it to the masses. That is the difference between Marxism and reformism.
-- Trotsky, Discussions on the Transitional Program (1938)

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It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse, and howl than to attempt to relate, to explain.
-- Lenin, April Theses (1917)

The separation of public works from the state, and their migration into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in the form of capital.
-- Marx, The Grundrisse (1857)

This is a kind of mutual reconciliation society... Actual extremes cannot be mediated with each other precisely because they are actual extremes. But neither are they in need of mediation, because they are opposed in essence.
-- Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843)

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
-- Karl Marx

An army without culture is a dull-witted army, and a dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.
-- "The United Front in Cultural Work" (October 30, 1944), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 235.