“To overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie and to establish the power of the proletariat in one country still does not signify the full victory of Socialism.”

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Against my protests a mausoleum was built on the Red Square, a monument unbecoming and offensive to the revolutionary consciousness.

One of the most surprising things in life is the sudden realization that one has become old.

You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.

Tell me anyway–Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.

The struggle against war and its social source, capitalism, presupposes direct, active, unequivocal support to the oppressed colonial peoples in their struggles and wars against imperialism. A ‘neutral’ position is tantamount to support of imperialism.

Is it possible to fulfill this task, is it possible to achieve the definite victory of Socialism in one country without the combined efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries? No, it is impossible.

It is quite clear that the German and Chinese revolutions in case of victory would have changed the face of Europe and Asia, and perhaps of the whole world.

Dialectical thought is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion.

Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain – at least in a poor country like Russia – and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.

Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely. But one must know the limitations of force; one must know when to blend force with a maneuver, a blow with an agreement.

The usages and methods of warfare are thus determined by changing circumstances and, therefore, they themselves can in nowise be eternal.

Communism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen.

Our party’s most outstanding mediocrity.

The dictatorship of the Communist Party is maintained by recourse to every form of violence.

Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever.

Socialism means slavery.

A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

Socialism is not spontaneous. It does not arise of itself. It has abiding principles according to which the major means of production and distribution ought to be socialised if exploitation of the many by the few is to be prevented; if, that is to say, egalitarianism in the economy is to be protected.

What pushes the masses into the camp of socialism is, even more than the illusion that socialism will make them richer, the expectation that it will curb all those who are better than they themselves are.

The Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism.

Socialism easily accepts despotism. It requires the strongest execution of power — power sufficient to interfere with property.

Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys.

We are redefining and we are restating our socialism in terms of the scientific revolution