Vladimir Lenin

Sometimes – history needs a push.

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

Exchange, fair or unfair,always presupposes and includes the rule of the bourgeoisie.

Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.

It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of the revolution’ than to write about it.

Capitalists can buy themselves out of any crisis, so long as they make the workers pay

The North has been held back by out of touch Westminster politicians. Let’s hand power to northern communities to manage their transport systems.

Stalin is the most popular figure in all of Russia.

The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on – because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.

You can do a lot more with weapons and politeness than just politeness.

One who views Latin America today [1981] might well assume that Hitler had won the war, though in fact it is American liberalism that a bears a major responsibility for the plague of terror and torture regimes that often mimic the Nazis.

The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.

As in the past, the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized …

I don’t read books by people who have betrayed the Motherland.

Economic control…is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served.

The more intermediaries there are, the more problems there are.

The only card [Hillary Clinton] has is the woman’s card. She’s got nothing else to offer and frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the woman’s card, and the beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.

I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me.

Treat each federal dollar as if it was hard earned; it was – by a taxpayer.

To fear the world we have organized and led for three quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership, and our duty to remain the last, best hope of Earth, for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.

If you go back far enough, [socialism] meant basically control of production by producers, elimination of wage labor, democratization of all spheres of life; production, commerce, education, media, workers’ control in factories, community control of communities, and so on.