Best 3 quotes of Georgi Plekhanov on MyQuotes

Politics needs a flexible mind, for it has no immutable or eternal rules. In politics immutable or eternal rules lead to inevitable and swift defeat.

Passing to historical nations, we must first point out that in relation to them the word race cannot and should not be used at all. We do not know of any historical nation that can be regarded as racially pure; each of them is the product of an extremely lengthy and intense process of interbreeding and intermingling of different ethnic elements. Now try, after this, to determine the influence of “race” on the history of the ideologies of any nation! At a first glance it seems that nothing could be simpler and more correct than the idea that natural environment influences national temperament and, through temperament, the history of the nation’s intellectual and aesthetic development. But if Labriola had only recalled the history of his own country, he would have been convinced of the erroneousness of this idea. The modern Italians are surrounded by the same natural environment as that in which the ancient Romans lived, yet how unlike is the “temperament” of our modern tributaries of Menelik to the temperament of the stern conquerors of Carthage! If we were to undertake to explain the history of Italian art, for example, by the Italian temperament, we should very soon be confronted by the baffling question why this temperament, for its part, varied so profoundly at different times and in different parts of the Apennine Peninsula.

We know today that there is no such thing as absolute truth, that everything is relative, that everything is dependent on the conditions of time and place; but precisely for that reason, we should be very cautious in judging the “ignorance” of various historical periods. Their ignorance, to the extent that it is manifested in their characteristic social movements, aspirations and ideals, is also relative.