Joseph Stalin

Words are one thing – deeds something entirely different. Fine words are a mask to cover shady deeds. A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron.

A man’s eyes should be torn out if he can only see the past

It is difficult for me to imagine what personal liberty is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a society personal and any other freedom can exist for real and not on paper.

To choose one’s victims, to prepare one’s plan minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed … There is nothing sweeter in the world.

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.

Artillery is the god of war.

Don’t automatically obey Presidential directives if you disagree or if you suspect he hasn’t considered key aspects of the issue.

Take, say, the NYT or the Washington Post. They have dual functions and they’re contradictory. One function is to subdue the great beast. But another function is to let their audience, which is an elite audience, gain a tolerably realistic picture of what’s going on in the world.

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

In my personal opinion, Russia is no less democratic than it used to be. It is a democratic country. It is democratic enough.

The Russian parliament has condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

You in Lebanon, your power is no match to Israel. Israel, militarily, is more powerful than you and maybe it is more powerful than all the Arab countries, or most of them.

See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.

The universities…are not independent institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well. And it’s generally true of corporations. It’s true of Fascist states, for that matter. But the institution itself is parasitic.

In the Soviet Union, it’s takes more courage to retreat than advance.

Thousands of mercenaries, who have trained in camps on the territory of Chechnya as well as come in from abroad, are actually preparing to impose extremist ideas on the whole world.

Our task, your task… is to try to connect the dots before something happens. People say, ‘Well, where’s the smoking gun?’ Well, we don’t want to see a smoking gun from a weapon of mass destruction.

If every human rights atrocity is described as a Holocaust,[Adolf] Hitler’s attempted obliteration of the Jewish people is diminished or de-recognised in our history.

We desire to give the Soviet people absolute liberty of voting for those they desire to elect, those whom they trust to ensure their interests.

While capital is now highly mobile, labor is increasingly immobile – and that has immediate consequences. It means that it is easy to shift production to low-wage, high-repression areas of the world with low environmental standards.

American Communists have the opportunity to preach freely their ideas. It would be absolutely wrong to hold the Soviet government responsible for activities of the American Communists.