Quotes by Antonio Gramsci

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When the political man exercises a policy for the art of the time to express a cultural world if it is a political activity, not an artistic criticism; if the cultural world that is being fought for is a living and necessary fact, its expressiveness will be irresistible and it will find its artists... But if... this irresistible character does not show itself and does not act, it means that it is a world fictitious and false, a lucubration of mediocre people, who complain that people of greater scope than themselves do not agree with them ... this is the way of defending themselves of some petty artists who, out of opportunism, affirm certain principles, but they feel unable to express them artistically, that is, through their own activity...

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Art for art's sake and art with tendency: Establishing the principle that in the work of art only its artistic character is to be sought, it is not at all excluded to investigate what kind of feelings and what attitude of life circulates in the work of art itself... it is excluded that a work to be beautiful only because of its moral and political content and not because of its form in which its abstract content has been fused and identified.