John Peter Nettl Quotes

A dead martyr can be manipulated by his heirs; a living one is apt to drag his colleagues to the extremes dictated by the contingent pressures of his martyrdom.

Among those who pledged their support to the Central Committee was Feliks Dzierzynski. It was only after the arrest of this fanatic personality and devoted organizer that the National Committee could be established on home ground...Dzierzynski was released from prison by the revolution of March 1917 and henceforward devoted his fierce talents and loyalties entirely to the Russian Bolshevik party...(he) admitted frankly that he could only love or hate completely, and never in part.

Personal dislike as a political end to itself was alien to her; one should not attack people in public except as for political purposes. To this extent, her attitude was the exact opposite of her German colleagues' who deplored personal politics in public, but respected personal dislike.

Clarity is blinding and can be the most destructive element of all in human relations.

If they had kept quiet, and lain low for a time, things might have fizzled out as another unreal Wortstreist, blown up by a few ambitious authors of the party press. As it was, they decided to counter-attack the noisy, irrepressible outsiders--foreigners, to boot--and so forced a reluctant leadership to turn its full, slow, wrath against them; and against Bernstein too. For the most practical manifestation of revisionism was indiscipline and disobedience, a door opened to centrifugal forces of bourgeois influence.

As Jogiches walked in with her past the potted plants in the entrance, to face the smiles and all the food laid out on little tables, he whispered: 'As soon as this dinner is over, I shall kill you...

There is no tragedy without commitment; no negation even, without it.