Quotes from Joseph Stalin

Our Soviet society is socialist because private ownership of factories, plants, land, banks and means of transportation has been abolished in our country, and replaced by public ownership.

Having consolidated its power, and taking the lead of the peasantry, the proletariat of the victorious country can and must build a socialist society.

We built [socialistic society] for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks.

We built this [socialistic] society not for the curbing of personal liberty, but in order that human personalities should really feel free.

We have not yet built a communist society.It is not so easy to build such a society.

Revolution, the substitution of one social system for another, has always been a struggle, a painful and a cruel struggle, a life and death struggle.

Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division; and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.

The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do.

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

In the Soviet army it takes more courage to retreat than advance.

Great Britain provided time; the United States provided money and Soviet Russia provided blood.

We Marxists believe that revolution will occur in other countries, as well. But it will occur at a time when it will be considered possible or necessary by revolutionaries of those countries.

A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron.

We [U.S.S.R. and U.S.A.] can exist peacefully together if we don't indulge in too much mutual fault-finding in all kinds of trifles.

We don't let them have ideas. Why would we let them have guns?

The writer is the engineer of the human soul.

How do you expect the Germans to revolt when they don't even dare walk on the grass?

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.

Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.

The Hitlerite blackguards… have turned Europe into a prison of nations, and this they call the new order in Europe.

If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves.

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.

One death is a tragedy one million is a statistic.

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.