“The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the.”

—  Friedrich Engels

Letter to Philipp Van Patten http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_04_18.htm (18 April 1883)

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Friedrich Engels 87
German social scientist, author, political theorist, and ph… 1820–1895

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“The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organisation of the state. But after its victory the sole organisation which the proletariat finds already in existence is precisely the state. This state may require very considerable alterations before it can fulfil its new functions. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris Commune.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

Letter to Philipp Van Patten http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_04_18.htm (18 April 1883)

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“If you sleep upside down, do you dream upside down?”

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“The central core of truth is that Christmas turns everything upside down, the upside of heaven come down to earth. The Christmas story puts a new value on every man.”

Halford E. Luccock (1885–1960) American Methodist minister

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Context: The central core of truth is that Christmas turns everything upside down, the upside of heaven come down to earth. The Christmas story puts a new value on every man. He is not a thing to be used, not a chemical accident, not an educated ape. Every man is a V. I. P., because he has divine worth. That was revealed when "Love came down at Christmas." A scientist said, making a plea for exchange scholarships between nations, "The best way to send an idea is to wrap it up in a person." That was what happened at Christmas. The idea of divine love was wrapped up in a person.

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“Leninism is Marxism of the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution. To be more exact, Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general, the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular. Marx and Engels pursued their activities in the pre-revolutionary period (we have the proletarian revolution in mind), when developed imperialism did not yet exist, in the period of the proletarians' preparation for revolution, in the period when the proletarian revolution was not yet an immediate practical inevitability. But Lenin, the disciple of Marx and Engels, pursued his activities in the period of developed imperialism, in the period of the unfolding proletarian revolution, when the proletarian revolution had already triumphed in one country, had smashed bourgeois democracy and had ushered in the era of proletarian democracy, the era of the Soviets.”

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“The proletarian army must be exclusively composed of persons belonging to the working class, of persons who do not expoloit labour and who are directly interested in the victory of the workers' revolution.”

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“Lift the world up by your levity,
Rock, love, carry it away, turn it upside down.”

Sydney Carter (1915–2004) British musician and poet

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Context: Teach the crippled how to leap,
Throw their crutches on a heap,
Rock, love, carry it away, turn it upside down.
Rock, love, carry it away,
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“Gandhi on many occasions declared himself an anarchist”

George Woodcock (1912–1995) Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic

of his own kind — and he created, partly from his readings of Tolstoy and Kropotkin and partly on the basis of Indian communitarian traditions, the plan of a decentralized society based on autonomous village communes.
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“Christmas is a story about a baby, and that is a baby's chief business, turning things upside down.”

Halford E. Luccock (1885–1960) American Methodist minister

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Context: A lady, who looked like an animated Christmas tree with packages dangling from every limb, and I bumped and spilled. As I was trying to pick up the packages she gasped out, “Oh, I hate Christmas, anyhow! It turns everything upside down.”
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Christmas is a story about a baby, and that is a baby's chief business, turning things upside down. It is gross slander on babies that their chief passion is food. It is rearrangement! Every orthodox baby rearranges everything he sees, or can get his little hooks into, from the order of who's important in the family, to the dishes on the table. A baby in a family divides time into two eras, just as Christmas does. There is B. C., which means "before child," and A. D., which means "after deluge."

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“I know that timid breathing. Where
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That which momentously declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.”

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