Nikita Khrushchev Quotes
Joseph Stalin was a supreme egotist and sadist, capable of sacrificing everything and anyone for the sake of his own power and glory.
Nikita Khrushchev, 1894-1971, Soviet Premier, Address to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, 1956
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Referring to the autocratic President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Historically, most dictators have announced their worst intentions and in many cases were not believed by much of the world who then learned that they had made a serious error.
FDR was a marvelous judge of men and their character. De Gaulle could not separate himself from France and pushed the French Republic towards one man rule (himself) as much as anyone since Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Priest was the right wing demagogic radio host of his day. Virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Black, he was threatened with excommunication by the Catholic Church, which finally ordered him to cease us weekly radio show and stop the political hate.
Arguing the need to limit the power of the legislature:
At the time of this statement most people thought that Bush was joking. But by the end of his Presidency many looked back on the quote and thought that Bush had such preferences. He unilaterally took the country into the Iraq War and assumed Presidential Powers that no other president had ever attempted. Most serious, his administration actually took the formal legal position that the President did not have to obey the law if he unilaterally thought that it was not in the nation’s interest from the point of view of the Commander in Chief. So many debate whether this quotation was a light hearted joke of a harbinger of his real feelings about the Presidency.
Soon he had the power of a dictator but he didn’t force his will on the vast majority of the Cubans. His decrees made all the wealthy and the cronies of the dictator Batista outraged and most of them left Cuba. He was a dynamic demagogue and the people handed him dictatorial powers which he did not reject. He was so popular that he was the only leader in the Americas who would give 4 hour speeches and move through the streets without any bodyguards until the United States and dissident expatriates tried to assassinate him. With all that popularity, none the less he would not allow open criticism of his regime and jailed many political opponents. So he indeed became a dictator but never needed the machine gun to maintain power.
Prevented by the Military from ever taking office. She was commenting on recent attacks against minority Muslims by the majority Buddhists and one of the major reasons she claimed was the lack of trust in the Muslim community that had developed during the period of military dictatorship.
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and as chairman of the country's Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev stunned the communist world with his denunciation of Stalin's crimes and began De-Stalinization. He sponsored the early Soviet space program, and enactment of relatively liberal reforms in domestic policy. After some false starts, and a near-nuclear war over Cuba, he conducted successful negotiations with the United States to reduce Cold War tensions. His proclivity toward recklessness led the Kremlin leadership to strip him from power, replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier.
