Joseph Stalin

In war I would deal with the Devil and his grandmother

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

You do not lament the loss of hair of one who has been beheaded.

In the Soviet Union, it’s takes more courage to retreat than advance.

The Jews are not a nation!

I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this-who will count the votes, and how.

The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks…. And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.

Usually, by and large, the U.S. foreign policy, like other major states, is driven by the dominant domestic forces. That’s kind of natural. And the dominant domestic forces are, of course, the corporate sector. That’s not in question.

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

GATT and NAFTA ought to be called “investor rights agreements,” not “free trade agreements.” One of their main purposes is to extend the ability of corporations to carry out market-distorting operations internally.

Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.

Israel ranks her priorities in the following way: security, land, and water.

[The Americans] should accept their part of the blame. Let them say so. We talked to them all the time, we were telling them that we want Afghanistan to be an independent country, that we are leaving, we are withdrawing from that country. But at that same time, our partners were working in secret with those forces with whom they are now fighting. It’s called the historical and political boomerang. I think God has some mechanism that he uses to punish those that make mistakes.

I believe, as Lenin said, that this revolutionary chaos may yet crystallize into new forms of life.

The first role of government is to help people who are in crisis or need. That’s why we have government.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.

It appears, our partners thought that this would never affect them, this counterproductive politics of restrictions and sanctions. But now we are seeing that this is happening.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‘Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?

They invited a large investor, Coca-Cola, to take over a plot of land in Pulkovo Heights and install high-capacity power and communications cables, hoping that other companies would follow suit. It worked. After Coca-Cola developed their piece of land, Gillette came, then Wrigley, and then some pharmaceutical companies. An economic zone thus took shape within the city, where total investment now exceeds half a billion dollars. Furthermore, with the Committee’s encouragement, the city’s infrastructure began to be modernized to create the conditions necessary for successful business. The first major deal that Putin supported was the completion of a fiber-optic cable to Copenhagen. This project had been initiated back in the Soviet era but never completed. Now the efforts were successful, providing St. Petersburg with world-class international telephone connections.