“We Social Democrats dare not be like the other parties, all of whom are equally guilty of the injustices of the present system and equally responsible for them. Every one who suffers under these injustices looks to us for deliverance. Every one of us has had these victims of society after failing to get justice from the courts, from the government, from the Emperor himself, and from all the other parties, come to us as the last and only ones that can help them. They do not know our scientific program; they do not know what capital and capitalism mean; but they have the belief, the feeling, that we are a party that can help when all other parties fail. This belief is for us an inexhaustible source of power. It was a similar faith of despair that spread more and more in the decaying Roman empire and slowly undermined the heathen world until it finally collapsed. We give up this inexhaustible source of power if we ally ourselves with other parties and drive suffering humanity from us by saying to it: “We are not essentially different from the others.””

— Wilhelm Liebknecht

Once the boundary line of the class struggle is wiped away and we have started upon the inclined plane of compromise, there is no stopping. Then we can only go down and down until there is nothing deeper.
No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

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Wilhelm Liebknecht 53

German socialist politician 1826–1900

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“All who are weary and heavy laden; all who suffer under injustice; all who suffer from the outrages of the existing bourgeois society; all who have in them the feeling of the worth of humanity, look to us, turn hopefully to us, as the only party that can bring rescue and deliverance. And if we, the opponents of this unjust world of violence, suddenly reach out the hand of brotherhood to it, conclude alliances with its representatives, invite our comrades to go hand in hand with the enemy whose misdeeds have driven the masses into our camp, what confusion must result in their minds! … It must be that for the hundreds and thousands, for the millions that have sought salvation under our banner, it was all a colossal mistake for them to come to us. If we are not different from the others, then we are not the right ones – the Savior is yet to come; and the Social Democracy was a false Messiah, no better than the other false ones! Just in this fact lies our strength, that we are not like the others, and that we are not only not like the others, and that we are not simply different from the others, but that we are their deadly enemy, who have sworn to storm and demolish the Bastile of Capitalism, whose defenders all those others are. Therefore we are only strong when we are alone. This is not to say that we are to individualise or to isolate ourselves. We have never lacked for company, and we never shall so long as the fight lasts. On the essentially true but literally false phrase about a “single reactionary mass,” the Social Democracy has never believed since it passed from the realm of theory to that of practice. We know that the individual members and divisions of the “single reactionary mass” are in conflict with each other, and we have always used these conflicts for our purposes. We have used opponents against opponents, but have never allowed them to use us.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

“Every injustice that we suffer at the hands of men is at the same time a trial that comes to us from God.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

[2019, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, World Wisdom, 139, 978-1-93659765-9]
Spiritual life, Trials

“Let us not allow the splits and splintering to frighten us. It is, indeed, a pity, but what can we do, since we are all Bulgarians and all suffer from one common disease. If this disease had not been present in our ancestors, from whom we inherited it, they would have never fallen under the sceptre of the Turkish Sultan...”

Gotse Delchev (1872–1903) revolutionary from the Balkans

Letter to Nikola Maleševski (1 May 1899)

“When I speak here of our policy, I use the word without regard to anything immaterial and superficial, but in the sense which since the beginning of the party it has had for us in contrast to all other parties, – in the sense of the policy of the class struggle, which has very often changed in form, but in substance has remained the same, – our unique proletarian class policy, which separates us from all other political parties in the world of bourgeois society and excludes us from intercourse with them.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

“The supreme importance of tactics and the necessity of maintaining its class struggle character, is something the party has been well conscious of from the beginning. … We find that in all questions of tactics the thought was continually kept in the foreground that the party must be kept clean from all mixture with all other parties, every one of which, no matter how much they differed from each other or how furiously they fought among themselves, stood upon the ground of bourgeois society as a common basis. This separation of the Social Democracy from all other parties, this essential difference, which silly opponents take as a reason or pretext for declaring us political outlaws, is our pride and our strength.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

“We know ourselves what difficult times we live in. We know equally, and we are conscious of the fact, that with us—all of us at home and overseas—there rests the responsibility whether this form of government will remain, or whether it will fail. It is therefore good that we who meet from all corners of the world to take counsel with one another, should, at any rate among ourselves, hold this torch of freedom alight, and alive, until other nations come to see our ways.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Empire Parliamentary Association's Conference in Westminster Hall (4 July 1935); published in This Torch of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses (1935), pp. 5-6.
1935

“We may not do as other parties, because we are not like the others. We are – and this cannot be too often repeated – separated from all other parties by an insurmountable barrier, a barrier that any individual can easily surmount; but once on the other side of it, and he is no Social Democrat. We are different from the others; “we are other than the others.””

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

What for the others are necessities and conditions of life are death to us.
No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

“Every one of us is equal. Every one of us has worth. Every one of us matters. And when we respect the freedom of others -- no matter the color of their skin, or how they pray or who they are or who they love -- we are all more free. Your dignity depends on my dignity, and my dignity depends on yours.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Remarks to the People of Africa (July 2015)
Context: Every one of us is equal. Every one of us has worth. Every one of us matters. And when we respect the freedom of others -- no matter the color of their skin, or how they pray or who they are or who they love -- we are all more free. Your dignity depends on my dignity, and my dignity depends on yours. Imagine if everyone had that spirit in their hearts. Imagine if governments operated that way. Just imagine what the world could look like -- the future that we could bequeath these young people.

“We exist to change society. We are not likely to be very successful if we are horrified at any suggestion of changing ourselves. One of the things from which we are suffering is a misplaced national complacency: a belief that we do things better than anyone else. Do not let us be too afraid, as a Labour Party, of learning from some of our friends abroad. Parties all over the world have been modernizing themselves. There are only two unreconstructed socialist parties in the world—the French and the Australian. Do not let us be too conservative, complacent, and insular.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech to the Labour Party Conference in Scarborough (6 October 1960) in favour of revising Clause IV, quoted in The Times (7 October 1960), p. 20
1960s

“(The author has been writing of people striving for “this fleeting sense of being part of something greater and more unknowable than themselves”)
And entitlement strips this away from us. The gravity of entitlement sucks all attention inward, toward ourselves, causing us to feel as though we are at the center of all of the problems in the universe, that we are the one suffering all of the injustices, that we are the one who deserves greatness over all others.”

Mark Manson (1984) American writer and blogger

Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Chapter 9, “...And Then You Die” (p. 206)

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Wilhelm Liebknecht 53

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