#stalin

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

#am #criticism #entered #goes #i

I think my emotional revulsion against Stalin's terror would have stopped me in my tracks. ↗

— Theodore Hall

#emotional #i #i think #me #revulsion

We both agreed that Stalin was determined to hold out against the Germans. He told us he'd never let them get to Moscow. But if he was wrong, they'd go back to the Urals and fight. They'd never surrender. ↗

— W. Averell Harriman

#agreed #back #both #determined #fight

For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say! ↗

— Wilhelm Reich

#dictatorship #emotional-plague #hitler #laval #liberty

If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch. ↗

— A. N. Wilson

#active #early #eat #getting #great

It was wrong to allow Stalin to shape the European landscape of the 20th century. It would be even more wrong to let him shape the landscape of the 21st century. ↗

— Lawrence Summers

#21st century #allow #century #european #even

I think I must be the only British actor who's played both Stalin and Trotsky. I need to play Lenin so I can make it a triptych. ↗

— Brian Cox

#both #british #i #i can #i think