where fraternities are not allowed, communism flourishes.

Sunday was the normal day for the political awareness session at sea. Ordinarily Putin would have officiated, reading some Pravada editorials, followed by selected quotations from the works of Lenin and a discussion of the lessons to be learned from the readings. It is very much like a church service.

As is now generally admitted, a Soviet bomb would not have been achieved for several years more but for the success of Soviet espionage in obtaining secret information from Western scientists associated with the Manhattan Project. That is to say, political ideas in the minds of certain capable physicists and others took the form of...

To congratulate oneself on one’s warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.

I knew that coming from a family with an unhealthy social origins, things would be harder for me. Nonetheless, in my heart, hope never died. However, over time, I had learned that trying never died either. Trying was one thing I always had to do more than others, because, in the self-proclaimed society of equals,...

Stalin is dead! No school today…” was a chant to linger in my ears for years to come.

He thought of his wife, of his son, of his youth. He thought of life. He thought of death and then he thought of life again.

Man is by nature a curious animal. You can hide the truth from him temporarily, but not for ever.

Is China a drug? Like any drug, it depends entirely on the user’s own state of mind. If we’re making metaphors, for old China hands I’d imagine their time here draws parallels with the soaring euphoria and bleak depths of smoking opium, while China for the uninitiated is probably a bit like bath salts: the...

So you, too, like fruitcake? (RW on meeting Lenin in Zurich during World War I.)

[The] tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns…We are now…only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for developments in our culture outside technology, particularly in the social, political and economic fields. It is safe to predict that…such...

The very principle of democracy is founded on the possibility of making alternative choices. There is no longer a need for democracy, since ideology made the idea that “there is no alternative” acceptable. Adherence to a meta-social principle of superior rationality allows for the elimination of the necessity and possibility of choosing. The so-called principle...

Cono knew that all three of his tormentors would know the anthem by heart from their childhood years. They had sung it daily to belong to the elite of their country, wearing around their necks the red ties of the Communist Party Youth Brigade, which had formed their beings and all that they would be...

I believe profoundly that in the struggle against Communists and their organizations […] we cannot and should not resort to the methods and forms employed by the Communists.

Lenin and Stalin created the idiosyncratic Soviet system in the image of their ruthless little circle of conspirators before the Revolution. Indeed much of the tragedy of Leninism-Stalinism is comprehensible only if one realizes that the Bolsheviks continued to behave in the same clandestine style whether they formed the government of the world’s greatest empire...

If anybody tries to penetrate the past with the knife of the present will always act in vain. The past is invulnerable. Such attempts can only cause the present or the future to bleed.” – Gregor Brand

Communism in a capitalist world requires eliminating the hope of the citizens for owning what others own.

Finally liberty has come!

Mientras contemplaba al presidente tendido en el sarcófago de cristal, recordé la sensación de cataclismo que había tenido dos años antes al oír la noticia de su fallecimiento; el desengaño al descubrir que en el mundo no había dioses. Ni en sueños habríamos creído que el presidente Mao moriría un día, pero murió. Creíamos que...

There are two kinds of Communists: the arrogant ones, who enter the fray hoping to make men out of the people and bring progress to the nation; and the innocent ones, who get involved because they believe in equality and justice. The arrogant ones are obsessed with power; they presume to think for everyone; only...

For so many years, the official propaganda machinery had denounced humanitarianism as sentimental trash and advocated human relations based entirely on class allegiance. But my personal experience had shown me that most of the Chinese people remained kind, sensitive, and compassionate even though the cruel reality of the system under which they had to live...

One man can change the world, look at Adolf Hitler.

If you personally advocate that I be caged if I don’t pay for whatever “government” things YOU want, please don’t pretend to be tolerant, or non-violent, or enlightened, or compassionate. Don’t pretend you believe in “live and let live,” and don’t pretend you want peace, freedom or harmony. It’s a simple truism that the only...

Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.

The only way of life satisfying the need of all times must be motivated by incentives and rewards – materially, morally and spiritually because motivation for work is produced by incentives and rewards only, an aspect built into the fundamental specification of human nature itself. Any prescription not recognising this important aspect of life is...

[…] The negative turned positive, black misery sublimated into heightened consciousness, suffering into solidarity!

Ultimately, all arguments against markets are arguments against anarchy. Marx understood this much, at least.

There are two and only two ways that any economy can be organized. One is by freedom and voluntary choice—the way of the market. The other is by force and dictation—the way of the State.

Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!”-after the split between Anarchists and Marxists in 1872

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

The ‘Manifesto’ being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up,...

Whenever the communists are under fire, it [the term “red-baiter”] has served to divert attention from the subject matter to futile discussion of personal motives, the critic’s private life and other deliberate tricks of befuddlement.

The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.

There is often talk of human rights, but it is also necessary to talk of the rights of humanity. Why should some people walk barefoot, so that others can travel in luxurious cars? Why should some live for thirty-five years, so that others can live for seventy years? Why should some be miserably poor, so...

Scholars and enlightened always want to define the differences between communism, socialism, fascism and other economic or political systems. It really doesn’t matter to those who are subjected to those societies how someone has articulated their misery.

Those who are weak don’t fight.Those who are stronger might fightfor an hour.Those who are stronger still might fightfor many years.The strongest fighttheir whole life.They are the indispensable ones.

In Labor movements generally, success through violence can hardly be expected except in circumstances where success without violence is attainable.

Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler’s former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression...

Russian Communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great.

I have dedicated my life to fight against the heinous rottenness of modern capitalism because it robs the laborer of this world’s goods. But blow for blow I shall strike against Communism, because it robs us of the next world’s happiness.

Mama o sa gaseasca pe cineva care o sa scrie o carte despre povestea vietii noastre. O sa se numeasca USA DE FIER SI USA SPRE LIBERTATE.

In Shanghai, there were several pro-right circles of former officers. They realized that the Great War and European revolutions were a direct consequence of rotten liberalism. Words like order, family, discipline and duty didn’t mean anything anymore. Civil liberties, so dear to Nina Kupina and people like her, resulted in monstrous egotism and total moral...

Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.

Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind … when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organization of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in...

Violence, of course, is generally associated with frankly totalitarian forms of anti-political utopianism like Communism, but the Second World War shows that liberal universalists are as capable of violence as Communists. They are just less capable of honesty.

A coal miner from Chongjin whom I met in 2004 in China told me, “People are not stupid. Everybody thinks our own government is to blame for our terrible situation. We all know we think that and we all know that everybody else thinks that. We don’t need to talk about it.

Komunizm był szary – truizm, który zatruł umysły. Więc gdy się bohatersko wyzwolilyśmy, pierwszym odruchem była wizyta w sklepie z farbami. I tak teraz wygląda moja ojczyzna: jakby małpa bawiła się pędzlem. Mnie jednak to imponuje. Ta sobiepańskość, to warcholostwo, ta wolność od reguł, od estetycznej poprawności, od napomnień znawców, czasami wręcz od rozumu: bo...

On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of...

Naturally there was the notion of private property as a pragmatic concept, for individuals or groups have a proclivity to tend to their own possessions with greater care and reverence than they would to common property…in such cases, the notion of ownership would underscore a relationship existing between distinct people, rather than a legal association...

[I]n communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.