Antonio Gramsci citáty

„Jsem pesimista kvůli inteligenci, ale optimista kvůli vůli.“

—  Antonio Gramsci

19. prosince 1929

„Jediný a oprávněný entuziasmus je takový, jenž je provázen rozumem, řízenou vůlí a činností, bohatstvím invence v konkrétním počínání.“

—  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

Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971).

„To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act.“

—  Antonio Gramsci

Letter from Prison (21 June 1919), translated by Hamish Henderson, Edinburgh University Student Publications.

„All men are intellectuals: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.“

—  Antonio Gramsci

Zdroj: Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971).

„Man is above all else mind, consciousness -- that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.“

—  Antonio Gramsci

„Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.“

—  Antonio Gramsci

Varianta: Pessimism of the spirit; optimism of the will.

„I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.“

—  Antonio Gramsci

Letter from Prison (19 December 1929); also attributed to Romain Rolland.
Zdroj: Gramsci's Prison Letters

„If you beat your head against the wall, it is your head that breaks and not the wall.“

—  Antonio Gramsci

„History is at once freedom and necessity.“

—  Antonio Gramsci

Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971).

„To tell the truth is revolutionary.“

—  Antonio Gramsci

The first number of L'Ordine Nuovo, edited by Gramsci, appeared in 1921 with this motto of Ferdinand Lassalle on the first page. It is often misattributed to Gramsci.
Misattributed

„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, Prison Notebooks

Originál: (it) La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati.
Zdroj: :s:Pagina:Gramsci - Quaderni del carcere, Einaudi, I.djvu/318 § (34). Passato e presente.
English translation Selections from the Prison Notebooks, “Wave of Materialism” and “Crisis of Authority” (NY: International Publishers), (1971), pp. 275-276.
Prison Notebooks Volume II, Notebook 3, 1930, (2011 edition) SS-34, Past and Present 32-33,

„The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned“

—  Antonio Gramsci

„The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.“

—  Antonio Gramsci

Loose translation, commonly attributed to Gramsci by Slavoj Žižek, presumably formulation by Žižek (see below).
Presumably a translation from a loose French translation by Gustave Massiah; strict English with cognate terms and glosses:
Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres
The old world is dying, the new world tardy (slow) to appear and in this chiaroscuro (light-dark) surge (emerge) monsters.
“ Mongo Beti, une conscience noire, africaine, universelle http://www.liberationafrique.org/imprimersans.php3?id_article=16&nom_site=Lib%C3%A9ration”, Gustave Massiah, CEDETIM, août 2002 ( archive https://web.archive.org/web/20160304061734/http://www.liberationafrique.org/imprimersans.php3?id_article=16&nom_site=Lib%C3%A9ration, 2016-03-04)
“Mongo Beti, a Black, African, Universal Conscience”, Gustave Massiah, CEDETIM, August 2002
Collected in: Remember Mongo Beti, Ambroise Kom, 2003, p. 149 https://books.google.com/books?id=6YgdAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Le+vieux+monde+se+meurt,+le+nouveau+monde+tarde+%C3%A0+appara%C3%AEtre+et+dans+ce+clair-obscur+surgissent+les+monstres%22.
Original, with literal English translation (see above):
La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati.
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.
Similar sentiments are widespread in revolutionary rhetoric; see: No, Žižek did not attribute a Goebbels quote to Gramsci http://thecharnelhouse.org/2015/07/03/no-zizek-did-not-attribute-a-goebbels-quote-to-gramsci/, Ross Wolfe, 2015-07-03
Misattributed
Zdroj: Selections from the Prison Notebooks

„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

The Modern Prince and other Writings, quoting a letter to his sister

„History teaches, but it has no pupils.“

—  Antonio Gramsci

Letter from Prison (21 June 1919), translated by Hamish Henderson, Edinburgh University Student Publications.

„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

Gramsci cited in Davidson, 1977, p. 70.

„The long march through the institutions.“

—  Antonio Gramsci

Due to German student movement leader Rudi Dutschke, who coined it in 1967 as „Der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen“.
See Strategy, Hegemony & ‘The Long March’: Gramsci’s Lessons for the Antiwar Movement http://carldavidson.blogspot.com/2006/04/strategy-hegemony-long-march.html, by Carl Davidson, April 06, 2006.
It was popularized in the protests of 1968, and Dutschke’s posthumous 1980 work is titled Mein langer Marsch (My long March).
See Marsch durch die Institutionen at German Wikipedia for extensive discussion.
A reference to the Long March of the Chinese Communist Red Army in 1934 & 1935; note that Gramsci died in 1937.
Various corruptions include “through the culture” or “slow march”.
Widely attributed to Gramsci, Joseph A. Buttigieg http://english.nd.edu/faculty/profiles/joseph-a-buttigieg/, the editor of the English critical edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks asserts that the phrase does not originate with Gramsci.
Footnote 21, page 50, reads: [“long march through the institutions”²¹] “This phrase is not Gramsci’s, even though it is ubiquitously attributed to him.”
[10.1215/01903659-32-1-33, 0190-3659, 32, 1, 33-52, Buttigieg, Joseph A., The Contemporary Discourse on Civil Society: A Gramscian Critique, boundary 2, 2010-06-30, 2005, http://boundary2.dukejournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/32/1/33]
The idea is connected with Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony, but does not originate with him – he called the concept a “war of position”.
Misattributed

„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. If you think about it, the question itself "what is man?" is not an abstract or "objective" question. It is born of our reflection about ourselves and about others, and we want to know, in relation to what we have thought and seen, what we are and what we can become; whether we really are, and if so to what extent, "makers of our own selves," of our life and of our destiny. And we want to know this "today," in the given conditions of today, the conditions of our daily life, not of any life or any man“

—  Antonio Gramsci

Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971).