I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.
— Eugene V. Debs, 1906
He walked his talk, generous in life as well as in his ideas, which tended towards the liberatory and encouraging. In a text exchange with the political thinker Astra Taylor shortly before his death, she told him what a “damn good writer” he was, adding that it’s a “rare skill among lefties”. He thanked her, and said: “I call it ‘being nice to the reader’, which is an extension of the politics, in a sense.”
— an anecdote about David Graeber in an eulogy published in The Guardian
Be kind to people, be ruthless to systems.
― Michael Brooks
Marxism remains the philosophy of our times because we have not gone beyond the circumstances which created it.
— Jean Paul Sartre