Antonio Gramsci Quotes
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, and a founder of the Italian Communist Party. Arrested by Mussolini's regime in 1926, he spent the last decade of his life in prison, where he composed the Prison Notebooks, more than three thousand pages of fragmentary writing on politics, philosophy, history, and culture. The quotes below are attributed to Antonio Gramsci, organized by topic.
Browse Antonio Gramsci by topic
Antonio Gramsci on Freedom
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“History is at once freedom and necessity.”
Selections from the Prison Notebooks(1971)
Antonio Gramsci on Knowledge
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“All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.”
Prison Notebooks -
“Letter from Prison (21 June 1919), translated by Hamish Henderson , Edinburgh University Student Publications .”
To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act. -
“Letter from Prison (21 June 1919), translated by Hamish Henderson, Edinburgh University Student Publications .”
History teaches, but it has no pupils. -
“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 c”
Cited in Davidson's (1977) Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography. London: Merlin Press., p. 77. -
“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”
Gramsci, 1965, p. 737 cited in Davidson, 1977, p. 35. -
“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 amon”
Gramsci cited in Garuglieri's Garuglieri, 'Ricordo di Gramsci.' Societa, 691-701., 1946, p. 700. -
“I can’t think why Delio [son] has not been told that I’m in prison, and why no one reflected that he might then find out about it indirectly, that is, in the most disagreeable way for a child, who then begins to doubt the truthfulness of those educating him, to think about it on his own account and draw apart. At least, that was my experience as a child: I remember it perfectly . . . I believe in ”
Gramsci cited in Fiori, 1970, pp. 22-23. -
“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.”
quoting a letter to his sister, as reproduced in "Gramsci in Prison: 1926–1937: Introduction" from The Modern Prince and other Writings trans. Louis Marks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1957; New York: International Publishers, 1968), p. 56.
Antonio Gramsci on Life
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“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.”
Gramsci cited in Davidson, 1977, p. 70.
Antonio Gramsci on Mind
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Attributed to Antonio Gramsci:
“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
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Attributed to Antonio Gramsci:
“The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is.”
Antonio Gramsci on Politics
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Attributed to Antonio Gramsci:
“Indifference is the dead weight of history.”
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“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 .”
Cited in Davidson's (1977) Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography. London: Merlin Press., p. 77.
Antonio Gramsci on Time
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“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.”
Prison Notebooks -
“History teaches, but it has no pupils.”
Letter from Prison (21 June 1919), translated by Hamish Henderson, Edinburgh University Student Publications . -
“Revolutionaries see history as a creation of their own spirit, as being made up of a continuous series of violent tugs at the other forces of society - both active and passive, and they prepare the maximum of favourable conditions for the definitive tug (revolution).”
Selections from the Prison Notebooks(1971)
Antonio Gramsci on Truth
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“To tell the truth is revolutionary.”
Letter from Prison (21 June 1919), translated by Hamish Henderson , Edinburgh University Student Publications . -
“To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act.”
Letter from Prison (21 June 1919), translated by Hamish Henderson , Edinburgh University Student Publications .
Things actually not said by Antonio Gramsci
A number of widely-shared lines are circulated as Antonio Gramsci but are in fact from someone else. Did Antonio Gramsci say these? No. Each entry below pairs the line with the person who actually wrote it.
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Did Antonio Gramsci say this? No.
“To tell the truth is revolutionary.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: 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.
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Did Antonio Gramsci say this? No.
“The long march through the institutions.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: 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 , by Carl Davidson, April 06, 2006. It was popularized in the protests of 1968 , and Dutsch
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Did Antonio Gramsci say this? No.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: 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
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Did Antonio Gramsci say this? No.
“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 , 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”.
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Did Antonio Gramsci say this? No.
“Widely attributed to Gramsci, 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.” Buttigieg, Joseph A. (2005) . " The Contemporary Discourse on Civil Society: A Gramscian Critique ". boundary 2 32 (1): 33-52. ISSN 0190-3659 . DOI : 10.1215/01903659-32-1-33 . Retrieved on 2010-06-30. 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”.
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Did Antonio Gramsci say this? No.
“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 is slow to appear and in this chiaroscuro (light-dark) surge (emerge) monsters. “ Mongo Beti, une conscience noire, africaine, universelle ”, Gustave Massiah , CEDETIM , août 2002 ( archive , 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 .
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Did Antonio Gramsci say this? No.
“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.
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Did Antonio Gramsci say this? No.
“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 is slow to appear and in this chiaroscuro (light-dark) surge (emerge) monsters.
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Did Antonio Gramsci say this? No.
““ Mongo Beti, une conscience noire, africaine, universelle ”, Gustave Massiah , CEDETIM , août 2002 ( archive , 2016-03-04)”
“Mongo Beti, a Black, African, Universal Conscience”, Gustave Massiah , CEDETIM, August 2002