Quotes About Politics

A promising young man should go into politics so that he can go on promising for the rest of his life.

Lenin, albeit tardily, realized that Stalin's personality very much mattered.

how did he come to be elevated to membership of the Bolshevik Central Committee?

This was Lenin's doing. How did he come to regard Stalin as suitable for membership in the inner circle of Bolshevik leaders?

Since Lenin wrote as he spoke, his political writings had something of the compelling quality of his political speeches.

Without a third revolution to carry off, there could be no second Lenin.

Does the mass give the leaders the program and its argumentation, or do the leaders give it to the mass?[163]

It is hard to believe that Lenin would not have won the case had his health permitted him to argue it before the court of the party congress. But when the

Russian Jacobinism.

All this, combined with adept maneuvering in the intra-party politics of the time, explains the otherwise paradoxical fact that Stalin's political fortunes rose at the very congress which listened in hostile silence when he tried to justify his conduct in the Soviet-Polish war.

central to Stalinism, that the class struggle inevitably grows sharper with the country's advance toward socialism.

whereas Lenin had envisaged the new Central Committee members as workers, for the most part, Stalin wanted to enlarge the Central Committee with well-disposed apparatchiki so as to increase his own influence within it.

the Central Committee expanded from a size of twenty-seven members and nineteen candidates in 1922 to sixty-three members and forty-three candidates in 1925, and many of the newcomers were Stalin supporters.

Leninism was in part a revival of Russian Jacobinism within Marxism.

During 1922 events moved swiftly toward a crisis in Lenin's relations with Stalin, who by this time felt sufficiently secure in his power base to assert views and persist in them even if they occasionally ran counter to Lenin's.

Lenin added a postscript on January 4, 1923, recommending Stalin's removal from the post of general secretary.

There is no indication that he thought of himself as a "machine politician" in our sense of that phrase.

Russian nationalism was as alien to Lenin's makeup as it was congenial, deep down, to Stalin's.

The party-state structure still showed considerable looseness in organization and mode of functioning.

Apart from their attitude toward Lenin, Bolsheviks were not generally inclined to attach much importance to the personal factor in politics. To their Marxist-trained minds, what mainly mattered about a comrade was not his personality but his political beliefs, his ideological commitment, the rightness or wrongness of his positions in party councils.

I don't take a great deal of interest in party politics. Social politics interests me a great deal more.

Every president has to live with the result of what Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam, when he lost the trust of the American people in the presidency.

There's very little that Idi Amin and Newt Gingrich have in common, but they both used words to shape how people think about things without regard for the truth.

Politicians play on our fears to manipulate us.