3 Quotes by Philip Pomper

That may sound contradictory, but I don’t think that we can do without an idea of truth, even if we know that we are generating hypotheses and interpretations. The idea is to inspire the quest, not insist upon an answer or promise an assured outcome. It’s a utopian project. The subject is not that important. It’s just a pathway into the problems.

One of the major weaknesses in Marxism as a doctrine resided in its failure to examine closely the moral characteristics of an immiserated proletariat. The notion that the miserable and oppressed will proceed to create a better world is, of course, inherently problematic.

There was more than a little truth in Trotsky's angry accusation of April 1912, after he had suffered the theft of the title of his journal [Pravda], that Lenin nourished himself on discord and chaos. But so did all revolutionary politicians, for revolutionary changes issue from profound crises. The bloody trenches of World War I created an enormous new revolutionary constituency, and only those leaders who knew how to exploit it would be prepared for the struggles that lay ahead.