Antonio Gramsci Zitate

„Kultur ist Disziplinierung des eigenen inneren Ichs, Inbesitznahme der eigenen Persönlichkeit und die Erlangung eines höheren Bewusstseins, mit dem man dazu kommt, den eigenen historischen Wert zu verstehen, die eigene Funktion im Leben, die eigenen Rechte und Pflichten.“

Gefängnishefte, H. 28, §11, 2232

„Alle Menschen sind Intellektuelle, […] aber nicht alle Menschen haben in der Gesellschaft die Funktion von Intellektuellen.“

Grido del popolo, 29. Januar 1916

„Staat = politische Gesellschaft und Zivilgesellschaft, das heißt Hegemonie, gepanzert mit Zwang.“

Gefängnishefte, H. 12, §1, 1500
Original ital.:"Tutti gli uomini sono intellettuali, si potrebbe dire percio; ma non tutti gli uomini hanno nella societa la funzione di intellettuali."

„Dass eine Masse von Menschen dahin gebracht wird, die reale Gegenwart kohärent und auf einheitliche Weise zu denken, ist eine ›philosophische‹ Tatsache, die viel wichtiger und ›origineller‹ ist, als wenn ein philosophisches ›Genie‹ eine neue Wahrheit entdeckt, die Erbhof kleiner Intellektuellengruppen bleibt.“

Gefängnishefte, H. 4, § 88, 783
Original ital.:"Stato = società politica + società civile, cioè egemonia corazzata di coercizione."

„Eine neue Kultur zu schaffen bedeutet nicht nur, individuell ›originelle‹ Entdeckungen zu machen, es bedeutet auch und besonders, bereits entdeckte Wahrheiten kritisch zu verbreiten, sie sozusagen zu ›vergesellschaften‹ und sie dadurch Basis vitaler Handlungen, Element der Koordination und der intellektuellen und moralischen Ordnung werden zu lassen.“

Gefängnishefte, Heft 11, §12, 1377

„Die Diktatur des Proletariats wird diesen großartigen Apparat der industriellen und intellektuellen Produktion, diese Antriebskraft der Zivilisation vor dem drohenden Zusammenbruch retten.“

Gefängnishefte, Heft 11, §12, 1377

Antonio Gramsci Zitate und Sprüche

„Vorläufig lassen sich zwei große superstrukturelle »Ebenen« festlegen - diejenige, die man die Ebene der »Zivilgesellschaft« nennen kann, d. h. des Ensembles der gemeinhin »privat« genannten Organismen, und diejenige der »politischen Gesellschaft oder des Staates« -, die der Funktion der »Hegemonie«, welche die herrschende Gruppe in der gesamten Gesellschaft ausübt, und der Funktion der »direkten Herrschaft« oder des Kommandos, die sich im Staat und in der »formellen« Regierung ausdrückt, entsprechen.“

"Die historische Funktion der Stadt", 1920.

„Wie jeder Mensch Philosoph ist, so ist jeder Mensch Wissenschaftler usw.“

Gefängnishefte, H. 12, §1, 1502

„Die Krise besteht gerade in der Tatsache, dass das Alte stirbt und das Neue nicht zur Welt kommen kann: in diesem Interregnum kommt es zu den unterschiedlichsten Krankheitserscheinungen.“

Gefängnishefte, H. 10/II, §54, 1349

„Im Osten war der Staat alles, die Zivilgesellschaft war in ihren Anfängen und gallertenhaft; im Westen bestand zwischen Staat und Zivilgesellschaft ein richtiges Verhältnis, und beim Wanken des Staates gewahrte man sogleich eine robuste Struktur der Zivilgesellschaft. Der Staat war nur ein vorgeschobener Schützengraben, hinter welchem sich eine robuste Kette von Festungen und Kasematten befand…“

Gefängnishefte, H. 3, §34, 354f.
"La crisi consiste a punto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati." - s:Pagina:Gramsci - Quaderni del carcere, Einaudi, I.djvu/318 § (34). Passato e presente.

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

Gefängnishefte, H. 7, §16, 874

Antonio Gramsci: Zitate auf Englisch

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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 Gefängnishefte

Quelle: :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,

“History is at once freedom and necessity.”

Gramsci cited in Davidson, 1977, p. 70.

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

Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971).

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

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

Quelle: Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971).

“To tell the truth is revolutionary.”

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

“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.”

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

Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971).

“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.”

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 Quelle: Selections from the Prison Notebooks

“History teaches, but it has no pupils.”

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

“The long march through the institutions.”

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

“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”

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

“It is all a matter of comparing one’s own life with something worse and consoling oneself with the relativity of human fortunes. When I was eight or nine I had an experience which came clearly to mind when I read your advice. I used to know a family in a little village near mine: father, mother and sons: they were small landowners and had an inn. Very energetic people, especially the woman. I knew (I had heard) that besides the sons we knew, this woman had another son nobody had seen, who was spoken of in whispers, as if he were a great disgrace for the mother, an idiot, a monster or worse. I remember that my mother referred to this woman often as a martyr, who made great sacrifices for this son, and put up with great sorrows. One Sunday morning about ten, I was sent to this woman’s: I had to deliver some crocheting and get the money. I found her shutting the door, dressed up to go out to mass, she had a hamper under her arm. On seeing me she hesitated then decided. She told me to accompany her to a certain place, and that she would take delivery and give me the money on our return. She took me out of the village, into an orchard filled with rubbish and plaster; in one corner there was a sort of pig sty, about four feet high, and windowless, with only a strong door. She opened the door and I could hear an animal-like howling. Inside was her son, a robust boy of 18, who couldn’t stand up and hence scraped along on his seat to the door, as far as he was permitted to move by a chain linked to his waist and attached to the ring in the wall. He was covered with filth, and his eyes shone red, like those of a nocturnal animal. His mother dumped the contents of her basket – a mixed mess of household leftovers – into a stone trough. She filled another trough with water, and we left. I said nothing to my mother about what I had seen, so great an impression it had made on me, and so convinced was I that nobody would believe me. Nor when I later heard of the misery which had befallen that poor mother, did I interrupt to talk of the misery of the poor human wreck who had such a mother.”

Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971).

“When I was a child the boys of the town never came near me except to make fun of me. I was almost always alone. Sometimes, finding me by chance among them, they hurled themselves against me, and not only with words. One day – and while he told me this his great eyes shone with an inner light - … they started to throw stones at me with more violence than usual, with the evilness which is found among children and the weak. I lost patience, and grabbing stones I too started to defend myself with such energy that my attackers were put to flight. Mario, I succeeded in beating them: I terrified them to such an extent that from that day they respected me and no longer annoyed me. I ran to my mother … and told her of my first victorious battle: she kissed me tenderly and it was the best prize that I could have wanted.”

Gramsci, 1965, p. 737 cited in Davidson, 1977, p. 35.