Top 40 Antonio Gramsci Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”

— Antonio Gramsci

Featured in: Struggle Quotes

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

— Antonio Gramsci

3. “To tell the truth is revolutionary.”

— Antonio Gramsci

4. “The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.”

— Antonio Gramsci

Featured in: Challenges Quotes

5. “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”

— Antonio Gramsci

6. “Every State is a dictatorship.”

— Antonio Gramsci

7. “Indifference is the dead weight of history.”

— Antonio Gramsci

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

— Antonio Gramsci

9. “Pessimism of the spirit; optimism of the will.”

— Antonio Gramsci

10. “The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.”

— Antonio Gramsci

11. “What comes to pass does so not so much because a few people want it to happen, as because the mass of citizens abdicate their responsibility and let things be.”

— Antonio Gramsci

12. “Common sense is the folklore of philosophy.”

— Antonio Gramsci

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

— Antonio Gramsci

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

— Antonio Gramsci

15. “Il vecchio mondo sta morendo. Quello nuovo tarda a comparire. E in questo chiaroscuro nascono i mostri.”

— Antonio Gramsci

16. “History teaches, but has no pupils.”

— Antonio Gramsci

17. “The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ’knowing thyself’as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.”

— Antonio Gramsci

18. “Destruction is difficult. It is as difficult as creation.”

— Antonio Gramsci

19. “Driving forward is the chief characteristic of western man since the Sumerians. His dread triad of vices is property-holding, voraciousness, and lust.”

— Antonio Gramsci

20. “Before puberty the child’s personality has not yet formed and it is easier to guide its life and make it acquire specific habits of order, discipline, and work...”

— Antonio Gramsci

21. “History is at once freedom and necessity.”

— Antonio Gramsci

22. “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

23. “The abolition of the class struggle does not mean the abolition of the need to struggle as a principle of development.”

— Antonio Gramsci

24. “The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilisations.”

— Antonio Gramsci

25. “One must speak for a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality.”

— Antonio Gramsci

26. “What are the “maximum” limits of acceptance of the term “intellectual”?”

— Antonio Gramsci

27. “Common sense is a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and one can find there anything that one like.”

— Antonio Gramsci

28. “I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn’t know where to die.”

— Antonio Gramsci

29. “Is it better to work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world and thus, in connection with the labours of one’s own brain, choose one’s sphere of activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be one’s own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the moulding of one’ own personality?”

— Antonio Gramsci

30. “Since defeat in the Struggle must always be envisaged, the preparation of one’s own successors is as important as what one does for victory.”

— Antonio Gramsci

31. “Ideas and opinions are not spontaneously “born” in each individual brain: they have had a centre of formation, or irradiation, of dissemination, of persuasion-a group of men, or a single individual even, which has developed them and presented them in the political form of current reality.”

— Antonio Gramsci

32. “The popular element “feels” but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element “knows” but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel.”

— Antonio Gramsci

33. “Culture is a privilege. Education is a privilege. And we do not want it to be so. All young people should be equal before culture.”

— Antonio Gramsci

34. “Freedom is not utopia, because it is a basic aspiration; the whole history of mankind consists of struggles and efforts to creates social institutions capable of ensuring a maximum of freedom.”

— Antonio Gramsci

35. “I live, I am partisan. This is why I hate those who do not take sides; I hate those who are indifferent.”

— Antonio Gramsci

36. “Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space. It is the “folklore” of philosophy, and, like folklore, it takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental character is that it is a conception which, even in the brain of one individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential.”

— Antonio Gramsci

37. “The people themselves are not a homogeneous cultural collectivity but present numerous and variously combined cultural stratifications which, in their pure form, cannot always be identified within specific historical popular collectivities.”

— Antonio Gramsci

38. “It should never be forgotten that, in the struggle between the nations, it is in the interest of each one of them that the other should be weakened by internal struggle. Hence it is always possible to pose the question of whether the parties exist by virtue of their own strength, as their own necessity, or whether rather they only exist to serve the interests of others.”

— Antonio Gramsci

39. “At the limit it could be said that every speaking being has a personal language of his own, that is his own particular way of thinking and feeling. Culture, at its various levels, unifies in a series of strata, to the extent that they come into contact with each other, a greater or lesser number of individuals who understand each other’s mode of expression to varying degrees, etc.”

— Antonio Gramsci

40. “Possibility means “freedom”. The measure of freedom enters into the concept of man. That the objective possibilities exist for people not to die of hunder and that people do die of hunger, has its importance, or so one would have thought. But the existence of the objective conditions, of possibilities or of freedom is not yet enough: it is necessary to “know” them, and know how to use them.”

— Antonio Gramsci

41. “A man of politics writes about philosophy: it could be that his “true” philosophy should be looked for rather in his writings on politics. In every personality there is one dominant and predominant activity: it is here that his thought must be looked for, in a form that is more often than not implicit and at times even in contradiction with what is professly expressed.”

— Antonio Gramsci

42. “The discipline imposed on citizens by the bourgeois state makes them into subjects, people who delude themselves that they exert an influence on the course of events.”

— Antonio Gramsci

43. “The history of education shows that every class which has sought to take power has prepared itself for power by an autonomous education. The first step in emancipating oneself from political and social slavery is that of freeing the mind. I put forward this new idea: popular schooling should be placed under the control of the great workers’ unions. The problem of education is the most important class problem.”

— Antonio Gramsci

44. “The brain is not nourished on beans and truffles but rather the food manages to reconstitute the molecules of the brain once it has been turned into homogeneous and assimilable substances, which potentially have the “same nature”, as the molecules of the brain.”

— Antonio Gramsci

45. “Culture is something quite different. It is organization, discipline of one’s inner self, a coming to terms with one’s own personality; it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s own rights and obligations.”

— Antonio Gramsci