Quotes By Joseph Stalin

Ah, these diplomats! What chatterboxes! There's only one way to shut them up - cut them down with machine guns. Bulganin, go and get me one!

I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.

As we know, the goal of every struggle is victory. But if the proletariat is to achieve victory, all the workers, irrespective of nationality, must be united. Clearly, the demolition of national barriers and close unity between the Russian, Georgian, Armenian, Polish, Jewish and other proletarians is a necessary condition for the victory of the proletariat of all Russia.

The Red Army and Navy and the whole Soviet people must fight for every inch of Soviet soil, fight to the last drop of blood for our towns and villages...onward, to victory!

The art of leadership is a serious matter. One must not lag behind a movement, because to do so is to become isolated from the masses. But one must not rush ahead, for to rush ahead is to lose contact with the masses. He who wished to lead a movement must conduct a fight on two fronts--against those who lag behind and those who rush ahead.

In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.

There is talk ... of our constructing Dnieprostroy through our own means. The means needed are great, several hundred millions. Let us not get into the position of the peasant who, after accumulating a nest-egg, instead of repairing his plough and renewing his equipment, buys a gramophone and goes bankrupt.

Hitlers come and go, but Germany and the German people remain.

There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot storm.

We do not want a single foot of foreign territory; but of our territory we shall not surrender a single inch to anyone.

Revolution, the substitution of one social system for another, has always been a struggle, a painful and a cruel struggle, a life and death struggle.

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.

Marxists have more than once pointed out that the capitalist world economic system contains in itself the seeds of a general crisis and of warlike clashes.

Bukharin's a swine and surely worse than a swine because he thinks it below his dignity to write a couple of lines.

Anti-Semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.

Undoubtedly, our path is not of the easiest; but, just as undoubtedly, we are not to be frightened by difficulties. Paraphrasing from the well-known words of Luther, Russia might say: 'Here I stand on the frontier between the old, capitalist world and the new, socialist world. Here on this frontier I unite the efforts of the proletarians of the West and of the peasantry of the East in order to shatter the old world. May the God of history be my aid!'

Leninism is Marxism of the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution.

This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise. If now there is not a communist government in Paris, this is only because Russia has no an army which can reach Paris in 1945.

What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.

There is no doubt that the absence of a second front in Europe considerably relieves the position of the German Army, nor can there be any doubt that the appearance of a second front on the Continent of Europe - and undoubtedly this will appear in the near future - will essentially relieve the position of our armies to the detriment of the German Army.