Vladimir Lenin

Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up.

In the history of modern socialism this is a phenomenon, that the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement has from national become international.

And is it not sects, bodies of definite, uncompromising principles, that lead us into revolutions?

The goal of Socialism is Communism.

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell.

The general threat has always been independence. The US and its allies have regularly supported radical Islamists, sometimes to prevent the threat of secular nationalism.

The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, ‘We’re sorry we did it,’ that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it’s just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, ‘We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.’ Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.

There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely.

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.

Our party has been accused of fooling the public by calling tax increases ‘revenue enhancement’. Not so. No one was fooled.

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.

Few people understand the magnitude of the catastrophe that happened late in the 1980s when the Communist Party had failed to modernize the Soviet Union.

We need a great president.

There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.

There’s plenty to criticize about the mass media, but they are the source of regular information about a wide range of topics. You can’t duplicate that on blogs.

No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

[living at the White House] This isn’t about us. There’s so much history here that no one family can claim this space as their own.

To those who oppose us, we say, ‘Strike the woman, and you strike the rock.’