“How can you make a revolution without executions?”

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

There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.

One of the chief symptoms of every revolution is the sharp and sudden increase in the number of ordinary people who take an active, independent and forceful interest in politics.

Democracy is indispensable to socialism.

America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism.

Free speech is a bourgeois prejudice.

Communists have become bureaucrats. If anything will destroy us, it is this.

Capitalists will sell us the rope we will hang them with.

No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.

One fool can ask more questions in a minute than 12 wise men can answer in an hour.

Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

He who does not work shall not eat.

Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.

The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into smaller states and all-national isolation, not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them.

When it comes to hang the capitalists they will compete with each other to sell us the rope at a lower price.

I sing the progress of a deathless soul.

That’s why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.

You stand on dead men’s legs. You’ve never had any of your own. You couldn’t walk alone between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly.

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.

The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it.

Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes.

You never know what life means till you die; even throughout life, tis death that makes life live.

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.