“Neither we nor anyone else can calculate precisely what portion of the proletariat is following and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. This will be revealed only by the struggle, it will be definitely decided only by the socialist revolution. But we know for certain that the ‘defenders of the fatherland’ in the imperialist war represent only a minority. And it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism. By exposing the fact that the opportunists and social-chauvinists are in reality betraying and selling the interests of the masses, that they are defending the temporary privelages of a minority of the workers, that they are the vehicles of bourgeois ideas and influences, that they are really allies and agents of the bourgeoisie, we teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices” - V.I. Lenin

“[…] Bishop Nikon, quoting a letter from a peasant, does write: ‘The land, bread and other important questions of our Russian life and of the region do not appear to reach either the hands or the hearts of the authorities or the Duma. These questions and such solution of them as is possible are regarded as ‘utopian’, ‘hazardous’, untimely. Why do you keep silent, what are you waiting for? For moods and revolts for which those same ‘undernourished’, hungry, unfortunate peasants will be shot down? We are afraid of ‘big’ issues and reforms, we limit ourselves to trivialities and trifles, good though they may be.’ That is what Bishop Nikon writes. And that is what very many Black-hundred peasants think. It is quite understandable why Bishop Nikon had to be removed from Damn affairs and Duma speeches for such statements. Bishop Nikon expresses his Black-Hundred democracy in arguments that are, in essence, very far from correct. The land, bread and all other important questions do reach the hands and hearts (and pockets) of the ‘authorities’ and the Duma; Under such circumstances, the cries about the Black-Hundred danger are the result either of absolute ignorance or of hypocrisy. And it is those who conceal their real aims and act behind the scenes that must play the hypocrite. The Mensheviks are raising an outcry about the Black-Hundred danger in order to divert the workers’ attention from the game they, the Mensheviks, are playing, or did play recently, by joining the petty-bourgeois bloc and bar gaining with the Cadets” - V.I. Lenin

“What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labour movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now ‘Marxists’ (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the ‘national-German’ Marx, who, they claim, educated the labour unions which are so splendidly organised for the purpose of waging a predatory war!” - V.I. Lenin

“However, the Bernsteinian and ‘critical’ trend, to which the majority of the legal Marxists turned, deprived the socialists of this opportunity and demoralised the socialist consciousness by vulgarising Marxism, by advocating the theory of the blunting of social contradictions, by declaring the idea of the social revolution and of the dictatorship of the proletariat to be absurd, by reducing the working-class movement and the class struggle to narrow trade-unionism and to a ‘realistic’ struggle for petty, gradual reforms. This was synonymous with bourgeois democracy’s denial of socialism’s right to independence and, consequently, of its right to existence; in practice it meant a striving to convert the nascent working-class movement into an appendage of the liberals” - V.I. Lenin

“But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism” - V.I. Lenin

“Why should we bother to reply to Kautsky? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply. There’s no end to that. It would be quite enough for us to announce that Kautsky is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything” - V.I. Lenin

“The task devolving on Communists is to convince the backwards elements, to work among them, and not to fence themselves off from them with artificial and childishly ‘Left’ slogans” - V.I. Lenin

“How should we judge whether a youth is a revolutionary? How can we tell? There can only be one criterion, namely, whether or not he is willing to integrate himself with the broad masses of workers and peasants and does so in practice. If he is willing to do so and actually does so, he is a revolutionary; otherwise he is a nonrevolutionary or a counter-revolutionary” - Mao Zedong

“As for people who are politically backward, Communists should not slight or despise them - but should befriend them - unite with them, and convince them and encourage them to go forward” - Mao Zedong

“The attitude of Communists towards any person who has made mistakes in his work should be one of persuasion in order to help him change and start afresh and not one of exclusion, unless he is incorrigible” - Mao Zedong

“All erroneous ideas, all poisonous weeds, all ghosts and monsters, must be subjected to criticism; in no circumstance should they be allowed to spread unchecked” - Mao Zedong

“If you don’t study the negative stuff, you won’t be able to refute it. Neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin was like that. They made great efforts to learn and study all sorts of things, contemporary and past, and taught other people to do likewise” - Mao Zedong

“Our dogmatists are lazy-bones. They refuse to undertake any painstaking study of concrete things, they regard general truths as emerging out of the void, they turn them into purely abstract unfathomable formulas, and thereby completely deny and reverse the normal sequence by which man comes to know truth… They understand nothing of the Marxist theory of knowledge” - Mao Zedong

“If we have shortcomings, we are not afraid to have them pointed out and criticised, because we serve the people. Anyone, no matter who, may point out our shortcomings. If he is right, we will correct them. If what he proposes will benefit the people, we will act upon it” - Mao Zedong

“We cannot mechanically apply what Comrade Mao Zedong said about a particular question to another question, what he said in a particular place to another place, what he said at a particular time to another time, or what he said under particular circumstances to other circumstances” - Deng Xiaoping

“All sense of dialectics is lost when someone believes that today’s economy is identical to the economy of 50 or 100 or 150 years ago, or that it is identical to the one in Lenin’s day or to the time when Karl Marx lived” - Fidel Castro

“In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing Communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the U.S.S.R. were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If Communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum” - Michael Parenti