A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.
The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do.
Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.
When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use.
Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division; and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.
Everybody has a right to be stupid, but some people abuse the privilege.
I trust no one, not even myself.
Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.
Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach.
The Pope? How many divisions has he got?
Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.
The writer is the engineer of the human soul.
Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.
Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.
By May, 1st, 1937, there should not be one single church left within the borders of Soviet Russia, and the idea of God will have been banished from the Soviet Union as a remnant of the Middle Ages, which has been used for the purpose of oppressing the working classes.
If any foreign minister begins to defend to the death a 'peace conference', you can be sure his government has already placed its orders for new battleships and airplanes.
If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves.
A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron.
It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a society personal and any other freedom can exist for real and not on paper.
Great Britain provided time; the United States provided money and Soviet Russia provided blood.
It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes.
Divide the world into regional groups as a transitional stage to world government. Populations will more readily abandon their national loyalty to a vague regional loyalty than they will for a world authority. Later the regions can be brought together all the way into a single world dictatorship.
To choose one's victims, to prepare one's plan minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed ... There is nothing sweeter in the world.
In speaking of the capitalists who strive only for profit, only to get rich, I do not want to say that these are the most worthless people capable of doing nothing else. Many of them undoubtedly possess great organising talent, which I would not dream of denying. We Soviet people learn a lot from the capitalists. But if you mean people who are prepared to reconstruct the world, of course you will not be able to find them in the ranks of those who faithfully serve the cause of profit. ..The capitalist is riveted in profit and nothing can tear him away from it.
Real liberty exists only there where exploitation has been annihilated, where no oppression of some peoples by others exists, where there is no unemployment and pauperism, where a person does not tremble because tomorrow he may lose his job, home and bread.
The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks.... And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.
World War II was fought for the abolition of racial exclusiveness, equality of nations and the integrity of their territories, liberation of enslaved nations and restoration of their sovereign rights, the right of every nation to arrange its affairs as it wishes, economic aid to nations that have suffered and assistance to them in attaining their material welfare, restoration of democratic liberties, and destruction of the Hitlerite regime.
World dictatorship can be established only when the victory of socialism has been achieved in certain countries or groups of countries ... [and] when these federation of republics have finally grown into a world union of Soviet Socialist Republics uniting the whole of mankind under the hegemony of the international proletariat organized as a state.
