Quotes about Joseph Stalin

141 Sourced Quotes

I tell you, in my opinion, the cornerstone of democracy is free press — that's the cornerstone. I'm convinced if the press... it was not possible, of course, but if the free press existed through this century, there wouldn't be Hitler there wouldn't Stalin, there wouldn't be all this incredible price people have to pay for their freedom, you know, because that's what they're always first after… newspapers, radio, television, everything like that.

The graves all are silent. The caskets are vacant. Stalin has no more wisdom for us. Nietzsche is preserved in books, having forgotten to lift his casket lid and tell us he was right. Muhammad gives us the slip. So does Buddha. It is Christ alone who defeats the grave. Nothing is left in the tomb but echoes and cobwebs. And so we do well to listen to Him with the ears of dying men.

What statesmanship! What vision! What power! We have known nothing like it since my ancestor, Peter the Great, broke a window into Europe by overrunning the Baltic states in the 18th Century. Stalin has made Russia great again!

Whittaker Chambers

Whatever has happened to Stalin, gentlemen, is a question for the Soviet Union.… You are responsible, and your forebears, for 60 million to 100 million black people dying in the slave ships and on the plantations, and don't ask me about anybody, please.

There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.

Ludwig von Mises

The fact that atomic war may break out, isn't that class struggle? There is no alternative to class struggle. This is a very serious question. The be-all and end-all is not peaceful coexistence. After all, we have been holding on for some time, and under Stalin we held on to the point where the imperialists felt able to demand point-blank: either surrender such and such positions, or it means war. So far the imperialists haven't renounced that

Vyacheslav Molotov

Stalin's postwar goals were security for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely that order.

John Lewis Gaddis

The salesman thanks the customer for patronizing his shop and asks him to come again. But the socialists say: Be grateful to Hitler, render thanks to Stalin; be nice and submissive, then the great man will be kind to you later too.

Ludwig von Mises

Capitalism has been fully restored in Yugoslavia, as is well-known, but this capitalism knows how to disguise. Yugoslavia portrays itself as a socialist state, but of a special kind, as the world has never seen it before! The Titoites even boast that their state has nothing in common with the first socialist state which emerged from the socialist October Revolution and which was founded by Lenin and Stalin on the basis of the scientific theory of Marx and Engels.

Once we ask why it should be that all human beings - including infants, the intellectually disabled, criminal psychopaths, Hitler, Stalin, and the rest - have some kind of dignity or worth that no elephant, pig, or chimpanzee can ever achieve, we see that this question is as difficult to answer as our original request for some relevant fact that justifies the inequality of humans and other animals.

I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin's orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved to death.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Central planning didn't work for Stalin or Mao, and it won't work for an entrepreneur either.

Michael Bloomberg

The whole history of my life, and in essence the whole history of the working class consists of this: that we have lived and fought under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin.

Mikhail Kalinin

By 1938, Mussolini could confidently assert that 'in the face of the total collapse of the system [bequeathed] by Lenin, Stalin has covertly transformed himself into a Fascist.'

A. James Gregor

Comrade Stalin showed us how to build socialism in a backward country: it's painful to begin with, but afterwards everything turns out just fine.

Hafizullah Amin

Pogroms are as old as Christendom; but without railways, the telegraph and poison gas there could have been no Holocaust. There have always been tyrannies; but without modern means of transport and communication, Stalin and Mao could not have built their gulags.

He thought of men like Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon. All it took was a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power and then fall under their spell.

I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating; but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us; perhaps we shall have to colonize the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there.

R. J. Hollingdale

The prospects of revolution seem therefore quite restricted. For can a revolution avoid war? It is, however, on this feeble chance that we must stake everything or abandon all hope. An advanced country will not encounter, in the case of revolution, the difficulties which in backward Russia served as a base for the barbarous regime of Stalin. But a war of any scope will give rise to others as formidable.

When my mother left us, he [Stalin] was left completely alone. And I think what came next, in the late 30s and after the war in the 40s - I think that was a result of his complete loneliness on top of the world. Nobody would argue with him anymore.

Svetlana Alliluyeva

Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union.

Your liberators tell you that that your suppressors are Wilhelm, Nikolaus, Pope Gregory the Twenty Eighth, Morgan, Krupp or Ford. And your "liberators" are called Mussolini, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin.
I tell you: "Only you yourself can be your liberator!"

Ideologies — isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurrence by deducing it from a single premise — are a very recent phenomenon.... Not before Hitler and Stalin were the great political potentialities of the ideologies discovered.

If Hitler hadn't turned against their beloved Stalin, liberals would have stuck by him, too.

Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, ruled America like devil king for four years. His purges were an American mirror image of Stalin's purges, an unnoticed similarity.

Martha Gellhorn

The House has noticed the Prime Minister's remarkable transformation in the past few weeks from Stalin to Mr. Bean, creating chaos out of order, rather than order out of chaos.

For a time I gave the appearance of defending Stalin. I didn't defend what he had done; the fact is, nobody could defend the things that Khrushchev revealed.

A Stalin functionary admitted, Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.

If Stalin could only see us now, with the American Ambassador here, he'd turn in his grave.

Anastas Mikoyan

It seems to me that I am more to the Left than you, Mr Stalin