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“The German experience brings us face to face with the major problem of the revolution in Western Europe. In these countries, the old bourgeois mode of production and the centuries-old civilisation which has developed with it have completely impressed themselves upon the thoughts and feelings of the popular masses. Hence, the mentality and inner character of the masses here is quite different from that in the countries of the East, who have not experienced the rule of bourgeois culture; and this is what distinguishes the different courses that the revolution has taken in the East and the West.”
― Anton Pannekoek

“Monotonous talk of the end of American hegemony, the universal cliché of the period, is mostly a way of avoiding mounting a serious opposition to it.”
― Tariq Ali, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad

“Through their donations and work for voluntary organizations, the charitable rich exert enormous influence in society. As philanthropists, they acquire status within and outside of their class. Although private wealth is the basis of the hegemony of this group, philanthropy is essential to the maintenance and perpetuation of the upper class in the United States. In this sense, nonprofit activities are the nexus of a modern power elite.”
― Teresa Odendahl, Charity Begins At Home: Generosity And Self-interest Among The Philanthropic Elite

“They were the people I modeled myself after because fitting in was easier than sticking out. I wore what they wore, I watched what they watched. I listened to the music they liked, and I screamed at musicians' names because these girls screamed first.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“Education is a struggle against instincts which are linked to elemental biological functions, a struggle against nature, in order to dominate it and create man immersed within his own time.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere I

“Neither [side] should seek hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region and each is opposed to efforts by any other country or group of countries to establish such hegemony.”
― Henry Kissinger, On China

“cultural cringe which prevents other people from challenging them. the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci used the term ‘cultural hegemonyâ€� to describe the way in which ideas and concepts which benefit a dominant class are universalised. they become norms, adopted whole and unexamined, which shape our thinking”
― George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

“The USSR felt safe only on a continent it controlled. The movement of Russian power or ideology westward from the Elbe or Danube could only bring the USSR into violent confrontation with the North Atlantic civilization. And the United States had twice taken to crusade to prevent the consolidation of Western Europe under single-power hegemony.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This kind of peace

“If anything, sources that have the support and protection of power and institutions should be treated as suspicious not superior. There are very few words that make me as nauseous as words like ‘prestigeâ€� and ‘prestigiousâ€�. Prestige is often a shortcut for getting power’s approval and blessings, which automatically, in my view, should disqualify any intellectual from being taken seriously.”
― Louis Yako

“While the imperial university continues to pay lip service to letting the subaltern speak, make no mistake: the subalterns have never been silent. They have always been thinking, writing, doing, and sensing. The problem has always been with the shortsightedness and racism of the colonizers and the imperial spaces where certain knowledge gets produced and promoted, while other knowledge gets silenced, mutilated, and buried under the rubble of indifference and arrogance.”
― Louis Yako

“Equating obscurity with rigor, while at the same time equating a clear and creative language with lack thereof is one of the most serious ills one faces in Western academia. Neither of these equations are accurate. They are certainly not mutually exclusive. Often feeble minds with mediocre arguments hide behind obscure and convoluted language. I am sure most readers have seen enough examples of clear writing that is profound, deep, and able to convey very complex ideas clearly. We simply must be careful not to confuse complexity with rigor and profoundness, as drunk people mistaken their foolishness for wisdom. Nor should we dismiss a clear language simply because it is conveying the point without unnecessary complexity or beating around the bush.”
― Louis Yako

“Another way, and this applies to all the areas covered under this section, is by practicing what I call intellectual boycotting, which I simply define as: boycotting any intellectual or writer canonized and imposed on us through Western academic institutions, media, or any other institution with money and power. Note that this doesn’t mean not to read them, but rather, to read and cite them (if necessary) with caution, and preferably with the intent of debunking or exposing their silences and blind spots rather than using them as a compass to evaluate other forms of knowledge.”
― Louis Yako

“I personally believe (and I know many readers will find this controversial) that we should never engage with any writers or scholars whose work is intentionally Euro-American centered and purposely ignores or refuses to engage with knowledge produced by thinkers outside the West. In other words, in knowledge production, reciprocate treatment (whether in engagement or citation) can be effective in challenging and changing the rules of the game.”
― Louis Yako

“The video was called The Clear Path and it followed the course of a life 40 years ago and the course of a life today. In the path 40 years ago the path was clear and obvious. The illustrated protagonists of the video did not need to spend time thinking about his sexuality or his gender or his religion. That same protagonist living life today was given options. What is your sexuality? What is your gender? How do you want to find connection and community? The point the video was making now was that there is no longer a clear path and that was more work. And at that point it was kind of pissing me off. I felt like it was making it seem like allowing for different kinds of people was a burden, but then the video turned it around. Over illustrated images of happy families of all sorts the narrator said 'The reality is the benefits of this far out weigh the costs. If we do not let people know that it is possible to be different the ones who are different will live their entire lives in a kind of cultural prison. And there are so many ways to be different that almost everyone ends up feeling imprisoned by some aspect of a society that only allows for the default path. The problem is that as progressives we pretend that there are no costs and that no one is losing anything. The video continued, but of course some people do lose, especially those whos power was tied up not in their wealth, but in fitting comfortably into the clear path. Now these people have only lost what they should lose, but that is also true of other forms of concentrated power. We are in a system that tells, for example, the wealthy, that they deserve all of their wealth and it should be protected through force. So, naturally the newly alienated feel singled out and victimized. The solution isn't going back to the one clear path. The solution is everywhere and always the decentralization and redistribution of all forms of power.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“Hiba S. is one of the pioneer Iraqi women academics and authors in the field of media and journalism, currently exiled in Amman. During a visit to her office in summer 2014, Hiba shared that the early days of the occupation in 2003 were the most difficult she had ever experienced. She recollected:
‘I was sitting in my garden smoking when I suddenly saw a huge American tank driving through the street. I saw a Black soldier on the top of the tank. He looked at me and did the victory sign with his fingers. Had I had a pistol in my hand, I would have immediately shot myself in the head right then and there. The pain I felt upon seeing that image is indescribable. I felt as though all the years we had spent building our country, educating our students to make them better humans were gone with the wind.�
Hiba’s description carries strong feelings of loss, defeat, and humiliation. Also significant in her narrative is that the first American soldier she encountered in post-invasion Iraq was a Black soldier making the victory sign. This is perhaps one of the most ironic and paradoxical images of the occupation. A Black soldier from a historically and consistently oppressed group in American society, who, one might imagine had no choice but to join the military, coming to Iraq and making the victory sign to a humiliated Iraqi academic whose country was ravaged by war. In a way, this image is worthy of a long pause. It is an encounter of two oppressed and defeated groups of people—Iraqis and African Americans meeting as enemies in a warzone. But, if one digs deeper, are these people really 'enemies' or allies struggling against the same oppressors? Do the real enemies ever come to the battlefield? Or do they hide behind closed doors planning wars and invasions while sending other 'oppressed' and 'diverse' faces to the battlefield to fight wars on their behalf?
Hiba then recalled the early months of the occupation at the University of Baghdad where she taught. She noted that the first thing the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) tried to do was to change the curriculum Iraqi academics had designed, taught, and improved over the decades. While the Americans succeeded in doing this at the primary and high school levels, Hiba believed that they did not succeed as much at the university level. Iraqi professors knew better than to allow the 'Americanization of the curriculum' to take place. 'We knew the materials we were teaching were excellent even compared to international standards,' she said. 'They [the occupiers] tried to immediately inject subjects like "democracy" and "human rights" as if we Iraqis didn’t know what these concepts meant.' It is clear from Hiba’s testimony, also articulated by several other interviewees, that the Iraqi education system was one of the occupying forcesâ€� earliest targets in their desire to reshape and restructure Iraqi society and peoplesâ€� collective consciousness.”
― Louis Yako, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile

“Yet, in most of the world, US power was hegemonic more than coercive. The United Statesâ€� offer to serve as policeman of the world has been accepted by a majority of the world since 1945, and by almost the entire world after 1991. Many countries look to the US military’s command of the commons (the world’s airspace and seas as well as outer space) to ensure global order and to protect them from nearby regional powers that, in the absence of American military dominance, could dominate or invade their neighbors. Thus, communist Vietnam, after decades of fighting and millions of deaths to free itself from US domination, eagerly signed up for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and is considering allowing the United States to base warships at Cam Ranh Bay to deflect Chinese power—and of course each and every Eastern European country begged for admission to NATO and the EU, just as Western European governments positioned themselves after World War II within a geopolitical and economic structure designed and controlled by the United States in return for protection from the USSR. American aid through the Marshall Plan came after the recipient governments had already cast their lot with the United States.”
― Richard Lachmann, First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers

“Now and for as long as it can reasonably be predicted there will be only three genuine Global Powers: the United States of America, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China.”
― Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, The Myth of Independence

“Empires, like adolescents, think they’ll live forever. In geopolitics, as in biology, expiration dates are never visible. As a result, it can be hard to distinguish growing pains from death rattles. When the end comes, it’s always a shock.”
― John Feffer, Splinterlands

“For the peculiarity of historical consent won from the masses within modern capitalist social formations is by no means to be found in its mere secular reference or technical awe. The novelty of this consent is that it takes the fundamental form of a belief by the masses that they exercise an ultimate self-determination within the existing social order. It is thus not acceptance of the superiority of an acknowledged ruling class (feudal ideology), but credence in the democratic equality of all citizens in the government of the nation - in other words, disbelief in the existence of any ruling class.”
― Perry Anderson, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci

“At every moment, the poverty and richness of God and destiny are not the main reasons, hegemony and surroundings are the main reasons most of the times.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih

“The term white "supremacy" creeps around, infecting and affecting everything around us, yet so few would even admit to agreeing with it. I replace the word supremacy with hegemony because white hegemony is a more accurate expression of the act and process of european-enforced global systematic colonialism. white hegemony is the actual process of systematized white domination, which is continually enacted upon the world and maintained daily.”
― Nicole Mitchell Gantt, The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful

“Strange are the ways of democracy; everyone disagrees with everyone else and such dissent is considered a good thing. Stranger are the ways of dictators; once they have coerced all their subjects to agree with them, they spread their evil wings across their borders to secure the nod of the rest of the humanity. That is how dictatorships usually end. If a dictator does not aspire to be a world hegemon, he could be forever, limited only by the fact that even dictators are mortal.”
― R. N. Prasher

“The adultist political hegemony has forced autocratic homogenization, alienation, and oppression into the hearts, minds, and hands of children and youth everywhere, and it can only be stopped with democracy.”
― Adam F.C. Fletcher, Democracy Deficit Disorder: Learning Democracy with Young People

“I don't incidentally suggest that the deceit is conscious. Much more likely, it's just the enormous power of conformity to convention, to what Gramsci called hegemonic "common sense." Some ideas are not even rejected; they are unthinkable. Like the idea that US aggression is aggression; it can only be "a mistake," "a tragic error," "a strategic blunder." I also don't want to suggest this is "American exceptionalism." It's hard to find an exception to the practice in the history of imperialism.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change

“In the global arena, the rise of new powers is not merely a challenge to Western hegemony but an opportunity to reshape global governance with a more inclusive approach.”
― Jibril Mohamed Ahmed

“From the moment that opposing interests and class conflict exist, there can be no unity of organization, and in spite of the outward appearance of popular sovereignty, the state remains the organ of the economically dominant class and the instrument of defence of its interests.”
― Amadeo Bordiga, The Democratic Principle

“From the moment that opposing interests and class conflicts exist, there can be no unity of organization, and in spite of the outward appearance of popular sovereignty, the state remains the organ of the economically dominant class and the instrument of defence of its interests”
― Amadeo Bordiga, The Democratic Principle

“Always capitalist policy consists in dividing the working class by making it adhere to two opposite capitalist parties.”
― Anton Pannekoek, Workers' Councils

“For years, we have been told that bankers were paid so much because they were cleverer than the rest of us. Now, it turns out you were not clever at all, and we are all suffering for your stupidity.”
― Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street

“Hegemony is not only hard work but also boastful.”
― Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street