Quotes About Faction

Socialism is not really an option in the material world. There can be no collective ownership of anything materially scarce. One or another faction will assert control in the name of society. Inevitably, the faction will be the most powerful in society -- that is, the state. This is why all attempts to create socialism in scarce goods or services devolve into totalitarian systems of top-down planning.

What's a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.

when the Bolshevik faction was recast as a separate party at the Prague conference in 1912, the Central Committee, now all-Bolshevik in composition, not only co-opted Stalin but also elected him as one of the four members of a "Russian Bureau" for direction of party activities inside Russia.

Far more than Menshevism and other Russian radical groups of the time, Bolshevism was a leader-centered movement. As a faction and later as an independent party, it was essentially Lenin's political following in Russian Marxism. As Menshevik opponents liked to say, it was "Lenin's sect.

The Mensheviks emerged from the Revolution of 1905 as the dominant Social Democratic faction in Georgia.

The maneuvers by which Stalin steered his faction to a conclusive victory over the other three are testimony to his extraordinary skill as a political strategist; they have been cited as a textbook example of the art of coalition strategy.

In 1926, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev belatedly joined in what was called the "united opposition." A rearguard action by two crippled factions, it was doomed to the debacle that overtook it in late 1927 when Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, along with large numbers of their followers, were expelled from the party.

Earlier in the year, Trotsky had been shipped into exile in Turkey. Organized opposition was now at an end. The struggle for leadership was over, and Stalin was the victor. As if to mark this fact and formalize the outcome, his fiftieth birthday, on December 21, 1929, was officially celebrated with great fanfare. The party, over which the Stalin faction reigned supreme, saluted him on that occasion as Lenin's successor—the new vozhd'.

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.

In a nation distracted by faction, there are, no doubt, always a few, though commonly but a very few, who preserve their judgment untainted by the general contagion. They seldom amount to more than, here and there, a solitary individual, without any influence, excluded, by his own candour, from the confidence of either party, and who, though he may be one of the wisest, is necessarily, upon that very account, one of the most insignificant men in the society.

The Spartan attitude reflected an important fact about the condition of the Greek world from 479 to 461: Its stability was apparent only and not real. The alliance between Sparta and Athens was not an alliance of states but of factions. The faction of Cimon and the faction that would be headed by King Archidamus were prepared to accept limits to the hegemonal claims of their states, but in each state there were significant elements of the population who were not.

Our race of real freedom is only beginning; hitherto there has been freedom for a party--licence for a faction, but the great mass of the people have been in bondage.

Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

Politics is about divisions. Wherever you come in on the subject, there are divisions.

In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.

It is impossible that the whisper of a faction should prevail against the voice of a nation.

Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction.

I am astonished but not discouraged by my enormous responsibility. Devoted both from affection and duty to the cause of the people, I shall combat with equal ardor aristocracy, despotism, and faction.

The Shield had run its course as a three-man group, and we'll go down in history as one of the greatest factions of all time.

factions can become "potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.

He railed against the baleful precedent that would be set if the legislature exiled an entire category of people without hearings or trials. If that happened, "no man can be safe, nor know when he may be the innocent victim of a prevailing faction. The name of liberty applied to such a government would be a mockery of common sense.

Fisher Ames, always a shrewd observer of the scene, mused that "a spirit of faction . . . must soon come to a crisis." He foresaw that congressional Republicans would discard their comparatively decorous criticism of Washington's first term:

During the war, a faction of young Marxists had broken away from the Social Democrats, denouncing the party's pro-war policy as a betrayal of the class struggle. These youths soon formed themselves into the Spartacus League (named after the rebellious Roman slave), then, after the war, reorganized the group as the Communist party of Germany