So, for years I've had quotes up in my classroom for decoration. Some are political and some aren't. This year, I need a new one, because I learned Hannah Arendt was a huge racist.
The ideal quote should be implicitly leftist, but not explicitly.
For example I currently have: "Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." - Eugene V. Debs
" Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." - Frederick Douglass
So the sort of thing a liberal would glance at and think yeah that sounds good, but is actually based. No Mao or Lenin or anyone like that that will set off the brainworms. Thoughts?
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
- Stephen Jay Gould
Wow, that is perfect. Just the sort of thing that will fly right under the lib radar
And it's such a poetic quote it might makes students interested and google who Luxembourg was!
“The American people are tired of women.” - Bernie Sanders
-7DeadlyFetishes
"The shape of our democracy is the issue that affects every other issue."
Reading this thread makes me understand why leftist memes are just run-on paragraphs
Y'all need to learn what "punchy" means
dude I got a great quote for your wall!!! The kids will love it check it out:
"It is well known that nothing of the "iron law of wages" is Lassalle's except the word "iron" borrowed from Goethe's "great, eternal iron laws". [1] The word "iron" is a label by which the true believers recognize one another. But if I take the law with Lassalle's stamp on it, and consequently in his sense, then I must also take it with his substantiation for it. And what is that? As Lange already showed, shortly after Lassalle's death, it is the Malthusian theory of population (preached by Lange himself). But if this theory is correct, then again I cannot abolish the law even if I abolish wage labor a hundred times over, because the law then governs not only the system of wage labor but every social system. Basing themselves directly on this, the economists have been proving for 50 years and more that socialism cannot abolish poverty, which has its basis in nature, but can only make it general, distribute it simultaneously over the whole surface of society! But all this is not the main thing. Quite apart from the false Lassallean formulation of the law, the truly outrageous retrogression consists in the following: Since Lassalle's death, there has asserted itself in our party the scientific understanding that wages are not what they appear to be -- namely, the value, or price, of labor—but only a masked form for the value, or price, of labor power. Thereby, the whole bourgeois conception of wages hitherto, as well as all the criticism hitherto directed against this conception, was thrown overboard once and for all. It was made clear that the wage worker has permission to work for his own subsistence—that is, to live, only insofar as he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist (and hence also for the latter's co-consumers of surplus value); that the whole capitalist system of production turns on the increase of this gratis labor by extending the working day, or by developing the productivity—that is, increasing the intensity or labor power, etc.; that, consequently, the system of wage labor is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more severe in proportion as the social productive forces of labor develop, whether the worker receives better or worse payment. And after this understanding has gained more and more ground in our party, some return to Lassalle's dogma although they must have known that Lassalle did not know what wages were, but, following in the wake of the bourgeois economists, took the appearance for the essence of the matter."
-Karl Marx
Just now remembering I used this for a warm-up discussion least year. Kids were like, "Yeah,that makes sense."
I always liked this one by Bill Haywood:
The mine owners "did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them!"
When education is not liberatory, the dream of the oppressed is to be the oppressor - Paulo Freire
The "two Terrors" quote might be worth a look, because everyone will think it's smart because it's from Mark Twain
“There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.” ― Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
Not a quote, but a teacher in my district had a big poster of Marx in his classroom with a speech bubble that said "These supplies are for everyone!", and under the poster were communal classroom supplies.
You’re a teacher?
"Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted”
- a little known communist named Ilyich Ulyanov
He would be a great pick. Libs have no idea who he is
“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” — Martin Luther King
