Stalinism's Quotes

#1. He yanked up a couple of mushrooms. "Tania, can we eat these?"
Taking them out of his hands and throwing them back on the ground, Tatiana said, "Yes. But we will only be able to eat them once.

Paullina Simons

#2. A couple of ounces ruled your life.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#3. That bowl of soup - it was dearer than freedom, dearer than life itself, past, present, and future.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#4. Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again.

Lionel Blue

#5. The horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things
they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.

Slavoj Zizek

#6. Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

Harold Bloom

#7. Stalin's Russia treated Jews as equals - not as superiors like the US. If Jewish nationalism were treated in England and the US as it was in Moscow in the days of Stalin, the citizens of Baghdad and Teheran, Basra and Ramallah would be able to sleep peacefully in their own homes.

Israel Shamir

#8. Though Stalinism may have been a needless tragedy for both the Russian people and communism as an ideal, there is the intellectually tantalizing possibility that for the world at large it was, as we shall see, a blessing in disguise.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

#9. Shukhov had figured it all out. If he didn't sign he'd be shot. If he signed he'd still get a chance to live. So he signed.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#10. Producing an animation series merely to fill time slots in the broadcast schedule is like generating cultural pollution.

Hayao Miyazaki

#11. If Stalin gives you a love advice, it has to succeed.

Slavoj Zizek

#12. The days rolled by in the camp - they were over before you could say "knife." But the years, they never rolled by; they never moved by a second.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#13. Stalinism is a pathology of socialism, Hitlerism being the apposite example for capitalism.

Robert Heilbroner

#14. Stalinism is linked with a cult of personality and massive violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like that in Russia and, I hope, will never again be.

Vladimir Putin

#15. Freedom meant one thing to him - home.
But they wouldn't let him go home.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#16. You put your back into the work. For unless you could manage to provide yourself with the means of warming up, you and everyone else would give out on the spot.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#17. The place was stifling. Suddenly it occurred to her that a trace of him still lurked in her, minute and spectral, that effluvial stain that would be her stigmata forever. It was then that she resolved to ask for an appointment to see him, as things had to be settled between them.

Edna O'Brien

#18. Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of. Quick: try to think of a single movie about the horrors of Stalinism. This is not a failure of imagination. This is moral meltdown.

Mona Charen

#19. Perestroika is nothing more than refined Stalinism.

Dan Quayle

#20. In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.

Richard Dawkins

#21. You opposed fascism, then you ditched communism.
'No, I didn't. Communism ditched me by turning into Stalinism'.

Arthur Koestler

#22. You don't have to be very bright to carry a handbarrow. So the squad leader gave such work to people who'd been in positions of authority.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#23. In Stalinism the tragedy is that its origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. In the origins you had a kind of workers' uprising; the true enigma is how this project of emancipation went so wrong.

Slavoj Zizek

#24. It's ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They're totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There's about as much freedom as under Stalinism.

Noam Chomsky

#25. Language is wild - you can't fence it or tell it what to do - and it's the same with people. Even under the worst excesses of Stalinism or consumerism, the human spirit will still express itself.

Jay Griffiths

#26. I worry that we are approaching a time when that which is shocking is squeezed out by the Stalinism of political correctness.

Joe Eszterhas

#27. Do not always be thinking of attack! Moves that safeguard your position are often far more prudent.

Aron Nimzowitsch

#28. Besides, when not hard at work with this research, I'm actually conducting a side experiment on how cigarettes and gin increase charisma. As you might guess, the results are looking very promising.

Richelle Mead

#29. Here a man can live. All right, it's a 'special' camp. So what? Does it bother you to wear a number? They don't weigh anything, those numbers.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#30. No, it's not [a book] Lana. It's an allegorical novella about Stalinism by George Orwell, and spoiler alert, IT SUCKS.

Sterling Archer

#31. In Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.

Slavoj Zizek