
“Your problem is you are too busy holding on to your unworthiness.”
Letter to Vladimir Lenin (21 December 1920); as quoted in Peter Kropotkin : From Prince to Rebel (1990) by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, p. 426
Variant translation: Whoever holds dear the future of communism cannot embark upon such measures.
It is possible that no one has explained what a hostage really is? A hostage is imprisoned not as punishment for some crime. He is held in order to blackmail the enemy with his death.
As translated in Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution (1970) edited and translated by Martin A. Miller http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/kropotlenindec20.html
Context: Vladimir Ilyich, your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.
Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? … If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done in the Middle Ages.
I hope you will not answer me that Power is for political men a professional duty, and that any attack against that power must be considered as a threat against which one must guard oneself at any price. This opinion is no longer held even by kings... Are you so blinded, so much a prisoner of your own authoritarian ideas, that you do not realise that being at the head of European Communism, you have no right to soil the ideas which you defend by shameful methods … What future lies in store for Communism when one of its most important defenders tramples in this way every honest feeling?
“Your problem is you are too busy holding on to your unworthiness.”
“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde, edited by Alvin Redman (1954)
2010s, Why Does the Left Suddenly Hate Russia? (2017)
“Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.”
13 November 2009 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/5673602109
Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy
Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking
O poeta é um fingidor.
Finge tão completamente
Que chega a fingir que é dor
A dor que deveras sente.
"Autopsicografia" ["Autopsychography"], in Presença, No. 36 (November 1932)
Fernando Pessoa's most translated poem.
Richard Zenith's translation:
The poet is a faker
Who's so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.
“I'm not holding you against your will; I'm holding you against your car.”
Source: Mr. Perfect
“Ideas change the world, but they do it by assuming shape, they do it by taking concrete form.”
Source: The New Party - (1961), Chapter 6, Structure, p. 60