Best 11 quotes of John Peter Nettl on MyQuotes

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.

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...

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

I am determined to bring even more severity, clarity, and reserve into my life (she wrote in 1908).

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.

Passion is curiously exclusive and the need for it irresistible, while promiscuity is passionless--a mere collector's obsession.

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.

Rosa reports the engagement of her niece in 1912 to a nice young man without a name. It may therefore be that the last descendants of the Luxemburg family are living somewhere in England.

She had privacy, and the privilege of walking up and down the same battlements as the sentries.

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