“Any profiteer is free to shorten the lives of his countrymen by denying them the essentials of life and he does this as a member of a highly respected class. The police protect him and his gains against the victims. The scientist ignores the effects of starvation, filthy lodging, and lack of education upon those who made the profit possible, and rushes to help the capitalist with technical advice, medical aid or even gratuitous praise. For who but the rich can pay well, who but those who have made heavy profits endow research?
As for religion, it merely proclaims that the oppressed will get their due in some other life, or — still more comfortingly — that they must have misbehaved in a previous birth to suffer so now. That is, they may be ignored altogether or squeezed even more painfully. The reformer, with the best of intentions, attempts to gain the benefits of a revolution without the revolution itself.”
Professor Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi (1907—1966), mathematician, historian, philologist, and geneticist
Words of wisdom | World Socialist Party of the US (wspus.org)
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