Joseph Stalin

Of all the treasures a state can possess, the human lives of its citizens are for us the most precious.

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.

Music’s a good thing, it calm the beast in the man.

Ah, these diplomats! What chatterboxes! There’s only one way to shut them up – cut them down with machine guns. Bulganin, go and get me one!

We do not want a single foot of foreign territory; but of our territory we shall not surrender a single inch to anyone.

There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot storm.

You need to put drones under control; you need to lay out certain rules of engagement in order to prevent or minimize collateral casualties. It is extremely important.

The democratic tendency… leads men unceasingly to multiply the privileges of the state and to circumscribe the rights of private persons… often sacrificed without regret and almost always violated without remorse… men become less and less attached to private rights just when it is most necessary to retain and defend what little remains of them.

I would like right now to address my colleagues in the regions, to ask them to not allow, under any circumstances, for flea markets and the like to appear at these stadiums, as appeared in other sport-related buildings in Moscow during the middle of the 1990s.

Power without a nation’s confidence is nothing.

Poland should be strong and prosperous and independent and play its proper role as a great nation in the heart of Europe.

No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used, not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists.

Let’s not talk about Communism. Communism was just an idea, just pie in the sky.

We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.

Much research, including a widely quoted Rand Corporation study of 1994, has shown that prevention and treatment are considerably more cost-effective than the coercive [drug war] measures that receive the bulk of funding. Such nonpunitive measures are also of course far more humane.

Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.

…the Pentagon has been the primary Keynesian mechanism whereby the government intervenes to maintain what is ludicrously called the health of the economy by inducing production, that means production of waste and destruction

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

It cannot in the opinion of His Majesty’s Government be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.

Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election.

The NRA have great power over you people. They have less power over me. I don’t need it. What do I need? But I’ll tell you, they are well-meaning