Roger Nash Baldwin Quotes

So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy

Roger Nash Baldwin

So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy.

Roger Nash Baldwin

Silence never won rights. They are not handed down from above; they are forced by pressures from below.

Roger Nash Baldwin

So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy.

Roger Nash Baldwin

If American champions of civil liberty could all think in terms of economic freedom as the goal of their labors, they too would accept "workers' democracy" as far superior to what the capitalist world offers to any but a small minority. Yes, and they would accept regretfully, of course the necessity of dictatorship while the job of reorganizing society on a socialist basis is being done.

Roger Nash Baldwin

I saw in the Soviet Union many opponents of the regime. I visited a dozen prisons the political sections among them. I saw considerable of the work of the OGPU. I heard a good many stories of severity, even of brutality, and many of them from the victims. While I sympathized with personal distress I just could not bring myself to get excited over the suppression of opposition when I stacked it up against what I saw of fresh, vigorous expressions of free living by workers and peasants all over the land. And further, no champion of a socialist society could fail to see that some suppression was necessary to achieve it. It could not all be done by persuasion.

Roger Nash Baldwin

I believe in non-violent methods of struggle as most effective in the long run for building up successful working class power. Where they cannot be followed or where they are not even permitted by the ruling class, obviously only violent tactics remain. I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which workers rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental.

Roger Nash Baldwin

The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, a traumatic shock to me, ended any ambivalence I had about the Soviet Union, and all cooperation with Communists in united fronts.

Roger Nash Baldwin
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