“Autocracy cannot do without its twin agents: a hangman and a priest, the first to suppress popular resistance by force, the second to sweeten and embellish the lot of the oppressed with empty promises of a heavenly kingdom.”

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.

People always have been and they always will be stupid victims of deceit and self-deception in politics.

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

Soviet power is a new type of state in which there is no bureacracy, no police, no standing army.

You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

The only one who doesn’t make mistakes is the one who doesn’t do anything.

We are not shooting enough professors.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.

Fascism is capitalism in decay.

Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.

I am a bad, wicked man, but I am practicing moral self-purification; I don’t eat meat any more, I now eat rice cutlets.

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich — that is the democracy of capitalist society.

Of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important.

An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.

Atheists have just as much of a right to the public discourse as any … people of any religious faith in this country.

There is no God and we are his prophets.

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.

Anybody who gives you a belief system is your enemy, because the belief system becomes the barrier for your eyes, you cannot see the truth.

No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.