Best Joseph Stalin Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“Depending on the contemporary mood, Orwell oscillates from Saint George to George the Seer to George the Sage. What other thinker has been both so fervidly claimed and derided by both the left and right? Who else except Kafka do we credit with having seen the sinister future? When the NSA spying scandal broke in June, Amazon sales of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four vaulted more than 6000 percent. The connection of Big Brother with the NSA might have been hysterical and spurious, but it was also testament to our sentimental, kneejerk affection for Orwell, to the fact that he remains the default scribe whenever our paranoia is fondled by the ominous machinations of realpolitik. The utter clarity and goodness of his intellect seem something of a miracle when one considers how many of his fellow writers botched the most pressing moral and political tests of their time. He could smell bullshit and blood a continent away: When a passel of leftist intellectuals was hailing the Soviet Union as humankind’s only hope, Orwell was persistent in pointing out that Stalin was a monocratic lunatic.”

Integrity Propaganda Totalitarianism Stalinism George Orwell Joseph Stalin Right Wing Politics Left Wing Politics National Security Agency

Author:William Giraldi

“Almost overnight, Soviet peasants needed to become factory workers and miners. Industrialization was to be financed by domestic means, given the absence of any meaningful foreign investments in the country; this meant that the peasantry that did not join the industrial workforce had to foot much of the bill. Herding them into collective farms seemed a promising way to force them to pay this bill. Stalin would state, not long after he unleashed the full brunt of his modernization program, that the Soviet Union was at least half a century behind the industrialized world, and needed to catch up with it within a decade. Every sacrifice toward this goal was justified. This, then, was the broader context in which Soviet daily life played itself out between 1928 and 1933.”

Soviet Union Peasants Industrialization Modernization Joseph Stalin Collective Farms Soviet Daily Life

Book:Life in Stalin's Soviet Union

Source: Life in Stalin's Soviet Union

“[Jürgen Habermas' obituary to friend and philosopher, Richard Rorty] One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”

“Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood. We have relied on Trotsky’s unrecognizably prejudiced portrait for too long. The truth was different. Trotsky’s view tells us more about his own vanity, snobbery and lack of political skills than about the early Stalin.”

Youth Joseph Stalin Leon Trotsky

Book:Young Stalin

Source: Young Stalin

“Neither Italian fascism nor German National-"Socialism" has anything in common with such a [Soviet socialistic] society. Primarily, this is because the private ownership of the factories and works, of the land, the banks, transport, etc., has remained intact, and, therefore, capitalism remains in full force in Germany and in Italy.”

Capitalism Socialism Fascism Private Property National Socialism Joseph Stalin

Author:Joseph Stalin

“We didn't do a good enough job to make sure something like the Second World War could never happen again. We only looked at one side of the story. There were two monsters, Hitler and Stalin, and the regimes behind them, but in Nurmberg only the Nazis were tried. There was no justice for the Soviet regime.”

Second World War Soviet Russia Nuremberg Trials Joseph Stalin

Author:Victoria Amelina

“In spite of everything, all the POWs except for the Russians were receiving food parcels and medication from the International Red Cross. The Soviet Union had withdrawn from that organisation. Stalin said then: “There are no POWs of ours – there are traitors…”

Wwii Soviet Russia Joseph Stalin Pows

Book:Over Fields of Fire: Flying the Sturmovik in Action on the Eastern Front 1942-45

Source: Over Fields of Fire: Flying the Sturmovik in Action on the Eastern Front 1942-45

“There was an old bastard named Lenin Who did two or three million men in. That's a lot to have done in But where he did one in That old bastard Stalin did ten in.”

Bolshevism Mass Murder Limericks Joseph Stalin Vladimir Lenin

Author:Robert Conquest

“In absolute numbers of people killed, the quarter century of tyranny (1929–53) of Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) over the Soviet Union ranks as the second deadliest regime in history, after that of his disciple Mao Zedong (1893–1976), who was responsible for even more deaths in Communist China between 1949 and 1976.”

Death Tyranny Soviet Union Mao Zedong Communist China Joseph Stalin

Book:Life in Stalin's Soviet Union

Source: Life in Stalin's Soviet Union

“The fervor and single-mindedness of this deification probably have no precedent in history. It's not like Duvalier or Assad passing the torch to the son and heir. It surpasses anything I have read about the Roman or Babylonian or even Pharaonic excesses. An estimated $2.68 billion was spent on ceremonies and monuments in the aftermath of Kim Il Sung's death. The concept is not that his son is his successor, but that his son is his reincarnation. North Korea has an equivalent of Mount Fuji—a mountain sacred to all Koreans. It's called Mount Paekdu, a beautiful peak with a deep blue lake, on the Chinese border. Here, according to the new mythology, Kim Jong Il was born on February 16, 1942. His birth was attended by a double rainbow and by songs of praise (in human voice) uttered by the local birds. In fact, in February 1942 his father and mother were hiding under Stalin's protection in the dank Russian city of Khabarovsk, but as with all miraculous births it's considered best not to allow the facts to get in the way of a good story.”

Source: Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“It may seem somewhat ironic that the Catholic Church finds itself advocating the same position against abortion as its severest Christian critics, the Protestant fundamentalists. In fact, it is no more surprising than finding the so-called pro-life movement keeping company with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao, all of whom at one time or another banned abortions. What they have in common is their belief, rooted in misogyny, that the woman's right to choose - a fundamental aspect of her autonomy - must be crushed in order to achieve what they have deemed a 'higher' religious, moral or social goal.”

Abortion Catholic Church Adolf Hitler Mao Zedong Protestant Joseph Stalin

Book:Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

Source: Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Even in former days, Korea was known as the 'hermit kingdom' for its stubborn resistance to outsiders. And if you wanted to create a totally isolated and hermetic society, northern Korea in the years after the 1953 'armistice' would have been the place to start. It was bounded on two sides by the sea, and to the south by the impregnable and uncrossable DMZ, which divided it from South Korea. Its northern frontier consisted of a long stretch of China and a short stretch of Siberia; in other words its only contiguous neighbors were Mao and Stalin. (The next-nearest neighbor was Japan, historic enemy of the Koreans and the cruel colonial occupier until 1945.) Add to that the fact that almost every work of man had been reduced to shards by the Korean War. Air-force general Curtis LeMay later boasted that 'we burned down every town in North Korea,' and that he grounded his bombers only when there were no more targets to hit anywhere north of the 38th parallel. Pyongyang was an ashen moonscape. It was Year Zero. Kim Il Sung could create a laboratory, with controlled conditions, where he alone would be the engineer of the human soul.”

Source: Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“Tiffany learned that Lin had stolen Tiffany’s book title idea: “2 girls 1 cup.” A month ago, Tiffany had confided to Lin about Tiffany’s research showing that there was nothing on Amazon with the title “2 girls 1 cup,” and Tiff intended to be the first one to use that title for her upcoming book. Lin had betrayed her. Now, Lin’s book was available online and it was on the bestsellers list. Tiffany’s first go-to move for revenge against any of her female friends was to go sleep with her BFF’s boyfriend. That was “Dr. Bob” as Lin called him affectionately (he was Lin’s drug source).”

Humor Romance Sexy Supermodel Adolf Hitler Mao Zedong Joseph Stalin 2 Girls 1 Cup Covergirl Pointer Institute

Book:2 Girls 1 Cup

Source: 2 Girls 1 Cup

“In early Soviet times, when Kharkiv was the capital of the Ukranian Soviet Socialist Republic, Moscow's policy of korenizatsiia - 'nativisation' - prompted a brief flourishing of a Ukrainian avant-garde, paywrights and poets and journalists attracted to this bustling city of industrial and trading fame, allowed to write in their own language at last. The policy was the Bolsheviks' attempt to endear this restive republic, and the others, to their rule. In this political environment, writers were elevated. This special treatment came, however, came with the heavy caveat of state control which was followed by repression - a story familiar across the Soviet Union. But in Kharkiv the axe fell quicker. Stalin grew tired of korenizatsiia and opted to wipe out the native intelligentsia instead. In the early 1930s, the party line shifted abruptly; Ukrainian 'bourgeois nationalism' was the new enemy. The purges began. The Soviet Union under Stalin's paranoid control regressed to Tsarist ways. Russification and centralisation, brutal orders issued by Moscow and carried out by its secret police.”

Soviet Union Ukraine Bolsheviks Joseph Stalin Kharkiv Korenizatsiia

Book:Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia's War

Source: Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia's War