Joseph Stalin

Each position, each metre of the Soviet territory must be stubbornly defended, to the last drop of blood. We must cling to every inch of Soviet soil and defend it to the end!

The leaders come and go, but the people remain. Only the people are immortal.

I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this-who will count the votes, and how.

Death is the solution to all problems. No man – no problem.

The United States should get rid of its militias.

It takes a brave man to be a coward in the Red Army.

Even if we do not always agree on every aspect, nobody should take this as an excuse to declare us as enemies.

The worst thing for a politician is to try and cling to power by every possible means, and focus only on that.

I feel like everyone else in this country today. I am utterly devastated.

It’s not a very big thing to say, ‘I made a mistake’ on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can’t.

This American government – what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.

History proves that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything superior.

..reading a book doesn’t mean just turning the pages. It means thinking about it, identifying parts that you want to go back to, asking how to place it in a broader context, pursuing the ideas. There’s no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.

Protest actions and propaganda are two slightly different things.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

The most effective device [of thought control developed in democratic societies] is the bounding of the thinkable, achieved by tolerating debate, even encouraging it, though only within proper limits.

If you want to preserve – I’m very serious now – if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press. And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started.

The glory of being a carrier pilot has certainly worn off.

As yet we do not plan to withdraw these forces. But I direct your attention to the fact that I did not call these bases by any other name – I called them bases. We are not building long-term military structures there and if we need to, we could withdraw our military personnel very quickly, without incurring any financial losses.

As the Cold War came to a definitive end, the Bush Administration created a Center for Defense Trade to stimulate arms sales while proposing government guarantees of up to $1 billion in loans for purchase of US arms.

At least in Russia, you cannot just go and tap into someone’s phone conversation without a warrant issued by court. That’s more or less the way a civilized society should go about fighting terrorism.