Joseph Stalin

When you chop wood, splinters fly

Die, but do not retreat.

When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use.

Each position, each metre of the Soviet territory must be stubbornly defended, to the last drop of blood. We must cling to every inch of Soviet soil and defend it to the end!

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.

It is not heroes that make history, but history that makes heroes.

[on Trump] I’m puzzled by that. People who do it are inflicting damage to the country’s domestic political situation, incapacitating the president and showing a lack of respect to voters who cast their ballots for him.

Competition becomes transformed into monopoly. The result is immense progress in the socialisation of production. In particular, the process of technical invention and improvement becomes socialised.

The only way we could get what most of the population wants with regard to health care is either by a large-scale popular movement, which would mean moving towards democracy and nobody in power is going to want that, or else if the business community decides that it’s good for them.

[on Bill and Hillary Clinton] Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.

[on Les Paul guitars] It’s the construction and sound of it. With this material, the wood and neck construction and scale length really yields a different sound all together, and I just gravitate towards that. I pretty much get everything I want with it, so I’m very satisfied.

It is a waste of time and a pointless pursuit to speak truth to Henry Kissinger, or the CEO of General Motors, or others who exercise power in coercive institutions — truths that they already know well enough, for the most part.

I hold it to be… a detestable maxim that, politically speaking, the people have a right to do anything.

An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.

I paid too heavy a price for perestroika.

The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

You must obey the law, always, not only when they grab you by your special place.

The United States could become a color-free society. It’s possible. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but it’s perfectly possible that it would happen, and it wouldn’t change the political economy, hardly at all.

…I try to keep in mind the principle that one should not try to persuade; rather, to lay out the territory as best one can so that others can use their own intellectual powers to determine for themselves what they think is taking place and what is right or wrong.

Russia does not and cannot have any political choice but democracy. I want to say, and even stress, that we share those universal democratic principles taken around the whole world.