"If you have had a chance to see the world as it really is,

"If you have had a chance to see the world as it really is, there are profoundly different roads you can take with your life.  You can just get into the dog-eat-dog, and most likely get swallowed up by that while trying to get ahead in it.  You can put your snout into the trough and try to scarf up as much as you can, while scrambling desparately to get more than others.  Or you can try to something that would change the whole direction of society and the whole way the world is.  When you put those things alongside each other, which one has any meaning, which one really contributes to anything worthwhile?  Your life is going to be about something--or it's going to be about nothing.  And there is nothing greater your life can be about than contributing whatever you can to the revolutionary transformation of society and the world, to put an end to all systems and relations of oppression and exploitation and all the unnecessary suffering and destruction that goes along with them.  I have learned that more and more deeply through all the twists and turns and even the great setbacks, as well as the great achievements, of the communist revolution so far, in what are really still its early stages historically."

From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey

from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist,

A Memoir by Bob Avakian, 2005

#23 page 166 in BAsics, from Talks and Writings of Bob Avakian

now on the Occasion of the Publication of BAsics, join Ruby Dee, David Murray, Maluca, Matthew Shipp, reg e. gaines and more in a
Celebration of Revolution and the Vision of a New World