Joseph Stalin

There is not, nor should there be, an irreconcilable contrast between the individual and the collective, between the interests of an individual person and the interests of the collective.

The press must grow day in and day out – it is our Party’s sharpest and most powerful weapon.

If any foreign minister begins to defend to the death a ‘peace conference’, you can be sure his government has already placed its orders for new battleships and airplanes.

Quantity has a quality all its own.

Of all the treasures a state can possess, the human lives of its citizens are for us the most precious.

You do not lament the loss of hair of one who has been beheaded.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having.

My liver swells with bile difficult to repress.

There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.

It is possible to be free and loving no matter what your circumstances.

We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.

Logic is like the sword – those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.

Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.

Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.

There’s not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.

This gives force to the strong — that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing –a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.

A home without a cat-and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat-may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think – yes, it was three; I attended their funerals.