Antonio Gramsci Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

Antonio Gramsci
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

Antonio Gramsci
I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn't know where to die.

Antonio Gramsci
State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armor of coercion.

Antonio Gramsci
Before puberty the child's personality has not yet formed and it is easier to guide its life and make it acquire specific habits of order, discipline, and work...

Antonio Gramsci
The history of education shows that every class which has sought to take power has prepared itself for power by an autonomous education. The first step in emancipating oneself from political and social slavery is that of freeing the mind. I put forward this new idea: popular schooling should be placed under the control of the great workers' unions. The problem of education is the most important class problem

Antonio Gramsci
Economy and ideology. The claim (presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism) that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx, the author of concrete political and historical works.

Antonio Gramsci
All men are intellectuals: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.

Antonio Gramsci
Revolutionaries see history as a creation of their own spirit, as being made up of a continuous series of violent tugs at the other forces of society - both active and passive, and they prepare the maximum of favourable conditions for the definitive tug (revolution).

Antonio Gramsci
Our motto is still alive and to the point: Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

Antonio Gramsci
We can see that in putting the question "what is man?" what we mean is: what can man become? That is, can man dominate his own destiny, can he "make himself," can he create his own life? We maintain therefore that man is a process and, more exactly, the process of his actions.

Antonio Gramsci
From the moment when a subordinate class becomes really independent and dominant, calling into being a new type of State, the need arises concretely, of building a new intellectual and moral order, i.e. a new type of society, and hence the need to elaborate the most universal concepts, the most refined and decisive ideological weapons.

Antonio Gramsci
For two years I have lived outside the world: in a dream world. One by one, I let each strand tying me to the world and to my fellow men be cut. I live entirely for the mind, for the heart not at all …. I turned myself into a bear, inside and outside … other people did not exist for me. For perhaps two years, I didn't laugh once and I didn't cry … but I never hurt anyone but myself

Antonio Gramsci
What comes to pass does so not so much because a few people want it to happen, as because the mass of citizens abdicate their responsibility and let things be.

Antonio Gramsci
My practicality consists in this: in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall … that is my strength, my only strength.

Antonio Gramsci