Frases de Thomas Sankara

“Nossa revolução não é um torneio de falar em público. Nossa revolução não é uma batalha de frases finas. Nossa revolução não é apenas para divulgar slogans que não passam de sinais usados por manipuladores que tentam usá-los como palavras de ordem, como palavras de código, como uma película para sua própria exibição. Nossa revolução é, e deve continuar sendo, o esforço coletivo dos revolucionários para transformar a realidade, para melhorar a situação concreta das massas de nosso país.”

“O imperialismo é um sistema de exploração que ocorre não só na forma brutal daqueles que vêm com armas para conquistar território. O imperialismo freqüentemente ocorre em formas mais sutis, um empréstimo, ajuda alimentar, chantagem. Estamos lutando contra esse sistema que permite que um punhado de homens na Terra governe toda a humanidade.”

“aquele que te alimenta, te controla”

“he who feeds you, controls you”

“Humankind does not submit passively to the power of nature. It takes control over this power. This process is not an internal or subjective one. It takes place objectively in practice, once women cease to be viewed as mere sexual beings, once we look beyond their biological functions and become conscious of their weight as an active social force. What's more, woman's consciousness of herself is not only a product of her sexuality. It reflects her position as determined by the economic structure of society, which in turn expresses the level reached by humankind in technological development and the relations between classes.

The importance of dialectical materialism lies in going beyond the inherent limits of biology, rejecting simplistic theories about our being slaves to the nature of our species, and, instead, placing facts in their social and economic context.”

“Comrades, there is no true social revolution without the liberation of women. May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence. I hear the roar of women’s silence. I sense the rumble of their storm and feel the fury of their revolt.”

“I would like to leave behind me the conviction that if we maintain a certain amount of caution and organization we deserve victory. … You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. … We must dare to invent the future.”

“Our revolution is not a public-speaking tournament. Our revolution is not a battle of fine phrases. Our revolution is not simply for spouting slogans that are no more than signals used by manipulators trying to use them as catchwords, as codewords, as a foil for their own display. Our revolution is, and should continue to be, the collective effort of revolutionaries to transform reality, to improve the concrete situation of the masses of our country.”

“The specific character of [women's] oppression cannot be explained away by equating different situations through superficial and childish simplifications[:]

It is true that both the woman and the male worker are condemned to silence by their exploitation. But under the current system, the worker's wife is also condemned to silence by her worker-husband. In other words, in addition to the class exploitation common to both of them, women must confront a particular set of relations that exist between them and men, relations of conflict and violence that use physical differences as their pretext.”

“We must choose between champagne for a few or drinking water for all.”

“Capitalism is the arsonist of our forests.”

“We must recognize today that it is normal for the wealthiest to be the greatest thieves. When a poor man steals it is merely a theft, a petty crime -- it is solely about survival and necessity. The rich are the ones who steal from the treasury, customs duties, and who exploit the people.”

“In these tempestuous times, we can't leave our enemies of the past and the present the monopoly on thought, imagination, and creativity.”

“We want to get our army involved with the people in productive work and remind it constantly that, without patriotic training, a soldier is only a criminal with power.”