Quotes About Stalin

Letting Stalin lead Mao into authorizing the Korean War was the only strategic mistake Mao ever made because, in the end, the Korean War delayed Chinese unification by a century in that it led to America's commitment to Taiwan.

Britain and France had made it a world war after Hitler invaded Poland. When Stalin did the same thing fifteen days later, no one in the Allied chancelleries took the risk of reacting.

It was the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himself rose to his position.

What, actually, is the difference between communism and fascism? Both are forms of statism, authoritarianism. The only difference between Stalin's communism and Mussolini's fascism is an insignificant detail in organizational structure.

Stalin's dethronement meant not only the collapse of one authority, but that of a whole institution.

Measured by European standards the ideological documents of Maoism, and especially the theoretical writings of Mao himself, appear in fact extremely primitive and clumsy, sometimes even childish; in comparison, even Stalin gives the impression of a powerful theorist.

Marxism under Stalin cannot be defined by any collection of statements, ideas, or concepts: it was not a question of propositions as such but of the fact that there existed an all-powerful authority competent to declare at any given moment what Marxism was and what it was not.

The disagreements between Stalin and Trotsky were real to a certain extent, but they were grossly inflated by the struggle for personal power and never amounted to two independent and coherent theories.

The most influential utopian idea of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was socialism, which has failed everywhere. Under the banner of socialism, Stalin's U.S.S.R. and Mao's China gave us not utopias but ghastly anti-utopias.

Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and a long line of implementers candidly admitted that force and violence would be necessary. In the close of the Manifesto, Marx said, "The Communists … openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions" (italics added).

Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites.

Stalin himself said in 1937 that "only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.

I don't like wannabe authoritarians who lie in order to destroy people who disagree with them. In that regard, I despise Stalin, too. Are you a fan of McCarthy's? Or are you not political? So many people aren't in this town. They apparently don't have the guts.

It was all so long ago and Stalin doesn't matter any more. Stalin lost his chic before you were born. Sex is always chic.

This man's name was Stalin. In the portraits and photographs he had a kind face and compassionate eyes. He looked like a loving grandfather or uncle, long unseen, wanting to take you into his arms. Gavrila read and told me many stories about Stalin's life. At my age young Stalin already had fought for the rights of the underprivileged, resisting the centuries-old exploitation of the helpless poor by the pitiless rich.

The Party was to the working people what the engine is to a train. It led others toward the best goals, it pointed out shortcuts to an improvement of their lives. And Stalin was the engineer at the throttle of this engine.

Since the fall of the Soviet regime, it has been revealed that six hundred bishops, forty thousand priests, and one hundred twenty thousand monks and nuns were killed during this period. Many of these died in the harsh conditions of prison or labor camp; others were shot or buried alive. By the end of Stalin's dictatorship, only some two hundred priests remained active in the Soviet Union. The scale of this martyrdom is unprecedented in the history of the Christian Church.

We forget that even worse choices than those have confronted us in the past—like sending billions of dollars of aid to Joseph Stalin to stop Adolf Hitler, just a few years after the former had slaughtered or starved to death twenty million Soviets, invaded hapless Finland, carved up Poland with Hitler, and sent strategic materials daily to the Third Reich as it firebombed London.

Stalin gave Hitler his strength by driving the middle classes away from Communism with the nightmare of forced collectivization, famine, and terror against the technicians.

Every time I see a picture of Stalin I look him square in the eye and I say: You're a meat eater, Joseph.

still laughing but with the same sorrow she had felt when a hitherto perfectly nice cabbie began to tell her that all the Jews in the first tower has been warned beforehand or that you can't trust Mexicans not to steal the rug from under your feet or that more roads were built under Stalin...

Little girl whom do you love more, mama or papa? -Stalin!

Stalin's whole attitude toward life may be caught in a statement which he later made as he was rising to power: "To choose one's victim, to prepare one's plans minutely, to stake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed ... there is nothing sweeter in the world.

Stalin: "We cannot forget the saying of Lenin to the effect that a great deal ... depends on whether we succeed in delaying war with the capitalist countries ... until proletarian revolution ripens in Europe or until colonial revolutions come to a head, or, finally, until the capitalists fight among themselves over the division of the colonies. Therefore, the maintenance of peaceful relations with capitalist countries is an obligatory task for us.