Now is the time of monsters
“There’s this quote from the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci that has been making the rounds a lot over the past few years. It goes, ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’
There’s also a looser translation of that last line that you hear sometimes: ‘Now is the time of monsters.’”
There’s also a looser translation of that last line that you hear sometimes: ‘Now is the time of monsters.’”
Ezra Klein, from How the World Sees America, With Adam Tooze. New York Times, January 30, 2026. The quote is from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, over 3,000 pages in 30+ notebooks written between 1926-1937 while he was imprisonied by Benito Mussolini's fascist regime.