“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”

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.

You must act with all energy. Mass searches. Execution for concealing arms.

But every little difference may become a big one if it is insisted on.

If you’re poor, you don’t often live near a good school. If it’s a competitive public school program, our kids are not prepared to enter those programs.

When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only child… eventually.

When people come up to me and say, “I was at your Game 7 in the playoffs in Toronto,” or, “I saw your first goal in the NHL,” that triggers memories. But I don’t sit around my kitchen table and tell my kids, “You know, one year I got 92 goals.”

I am poor and naked, but I am the chief of the nation. We do not want riches but we do want to train our children right. Riches would do us no good. We could not take them with us to the other world. We do not want riches. We want peace and love.

I think sports for kids is the greatest thing in the world because it teaches you how to share, about winning and losing and pressure. But I don’t think you should force your kid to become a professional athlete.

The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn’t have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.

People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same.

My kids are no different than anyone else’s – they tend to disagree with everything I say!