Antonio Gramsci

"The revolutionary imagination must be constantly renewed through contact with reality."

"To achieve change one must work within the structures of power while transcending them."

"Common sense can be enlightened and elevated to become good sense."

"The past is not dead but lives within us, shaping our possibilities."

"Power is not a thing to be possessed but a relation to be contested."

"To understand culture one must understand the material conditions that produce it."

"The authentic voice of a people emerges through their own artistic and cultural expression."

"Freedom is not achieved through individual enlightenment alone but through collective struggle."

"One must respect the intelligence and capability of ordinary people."

"The future belongs to those who can articulate the aspirations of the masses."

"Ideas become material forces when they capture the imagination of large numbers of people."

"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."

"To know oneself is true progress, for the man who does not know himself can never know anything else."

"The intellectuals are the dominant group's deputies in the exercise of subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government."

"Common sense is not something rigid and immobile, but is continually transforming itself, enriching itself with scientific ideas and philosophical opinions that have entered into common circulation."

"I hate the indifferent. I believe that life is struggle, duty, a severe dedication to ideals."

"State activity has expanded enormously, and there has been a consequent increase in the number and importance of career posts."

"The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date."

"Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will—this is what we need."

"Every relationship of hegemony is a pedagogical relationship, and occurs not only within a nation, between the different forces of which the nation is composed, but in the international and world-wide field, between different national and continental civilizations."

"The mode of existence of a new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life."

"It is true that the subaltern groups are necessarily fragmented and episodic in their existence."

"The popular element 'feels' but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element 'knows' but does not always feel."

"A new historical epoch cannot occur without a corresponding appearance of historically novel intellectual and moral conceptions."

"The apparatus of state is also a reinforcement of domination by one group over others."

"Cultural movements cannot be artificially created; they must arise organically from the people."

"The superstructure of civil society corresponds to the structure, and it is always the structure that determines the superstructure."

"An intellectual who does not participate emotionally in the life of a nation is not a national intellectual."

"The greatest danger comes not from external enemies but from the internal inability to recognize the necessity of change."

"Education should not be merely a transmission of knowledge, but a process of awakening human consciousness."