Love

Love refers to a range of particular emotions generally defined by strong attraction. Love marriages are a fairly recent phenomenon in human history, arising first in the most developed nations between the 14th to 19th centuries. Prior to such, marriages were arranged on the basis of things like establishing peace between different parties, establishing trading relationships and securing economic advantages, and developing political ties. Actual love was not considered important by those who arranged marriages, with brides in particular having to obey their fathers' wishes above all. In many developing countries, arranged marriages are still the norm and often involve factors such as ethnicity and especially religion. Friedrich Engels elaborated on the historical development of the role of love in marriage in his 1884 work The Origin of the Family.

Karl Marx, Jenny von Westphalen and Engels On Love and Marriage

Quotes

Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.

— Mao Zedong, Time magazine, 18 December 1950

But I, from poetry's skies, plunge into communism, because without it I feel no love.

— Vladimir Mayakovsky, Georgian-born Russian playwright, screenwriter and preeminent poet of the Russian Revolution, “Klop, Stikhi, Poėmy”, 1975, p. 36, Indiana University Press

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. Perhaps it is one of the great dramas of the leader that he or she must combine a passionate spirit with a cold intelligence and make painful decisions without flinching. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, of the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the level where ordinary people put their love into practice.

The leaders of the revolution have children just beginning to talk, who are not learning to call their fathers by name; wives, from whom they have to be separated as part of the general sacrifice of their lives to bring the revolution to its fulfilment; the circle of their friends is limited strictly to the number of fellow revolutionists. There is no life outside of the revolution.

In these circumstances one must have a great deal of humanity and a strong sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into extreme dogmatism and cold scholasticism, into isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.

— Che Guevara, Socialism and man in Cuba, 1965