-
False rhetoric and false boastfulness spell moral ruin and lead unfailingly to political extinction.
-
For the complete extinction of the state, complete Communism is necessary.
-
Peace, Land, and Bread! All power to the Soviet!
-
One must not count in thousands, like the propagandist belonging to a small group that has not yet given leadership to the masses; in these circumstances one must count in millions and tens of millions.
-
Socialists cannot achieve their great aim without fighting against all oppression of nations.
-
We must follow the rule: Better fewer, but better. We must follow the rule: Better get good human material in two or even three years than work in haste without hope of getting any at all.
-
Where and when have riots and anarchy been provoked by wise measures? If the government had acted wisely, and if their measures had met the needs of the poor peasants, would there have been unrest among the peasant masses?
-
Chess is only a recreation and not an occupation.
-
Those who are really convinced that they have made progress in science would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for the old.
-
We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.
-
Those who are opposed to armed uprising ... must be ruthlessly kicked out as enemies, traitors and cowards.
-
We do not have time to play at "oppositions" at "conferences." We will keep our political opponents... whether open or disguised as "nonparty," in prison.
-
We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.
-
Why should freedom of speech and freedom of press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?
-
The true leader must submerge himself in the fountain of the people.
-
Capitalists will sell us the rope we will hang them with.
-
Behind the October Revolution there are more influential personalities than the thinkers and executors of Marxism.
-
Give me a child for the first 5 years of his life and he will be mine forever.
-
The functionaries of our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted - or rather tend to be corrupted - by the conditions of capitalism and betray a tendency to become bureaucrats, i.e., privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people.
-
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them in parliament.
-
Ideological talk and phrase mongering about political liberties should be disposed with; all that is just mere chatter and phrase mongering. We should get away from those phrases.
-
Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.
-
Recovery proceeding excellently. Am sure that the crushing of the Kazan Czechs and whiteguards, as well as of the kulak extortioners supporting them, will be exemplarily ruthless.
-
All extremes are bad. All that is good and useful, if carried to extremes, may become-and beyond a certain limit is bound to become-bad and injurious.