Robert M. La Follette Quotes

Our hope is that the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry will maintain itself long enough to abolish itself when it has fulfilled its function and reached its goal. For whereas during the two opening periods of the revolution the path of the governments led from the fine ideal of democracy to the harsh and cruel reality of dictatorship, the path of the soviet dominion will lead from the harsh and cruel reality of dictatorship to the beautiful and realized dream of democracy.

Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Our party is a party of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletarian revolution is the only solution of the labour problem and all our work must lead to this goal.

The [Russian] Communist Party decided that policy. As a good communist, I have to go along.

… the supporters of Bolshevism have been hammering it into the masses that dictatorship is a vital necessity for the defense of the so-called proletarian interests against the assaults of counter-revolution and for paving the way for Socialism. They have not advanced the cause of Socialism by this propaganda, but have merely smoothed the way for Fascism …

… the Communists, who take their inspiration if not their orders from Moscow, are now a recognized party or faction in every country, and in several constitute a danger to the existing order.

Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

As an organized political group, the Communists have done nothing to damage our society a fraction as much as what their enemies have done in the name of defending us against subversion.

It is a very good thing, and a significant one too, to exterminate the bourgeoisie and capitalism in China.

The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.

I'm not a communist, but I'm not anti-communist either. I'm not afraid of communists, and declare that if a country wants to be communist, it has the right to be so.

… revolution is in vain unless inspired by its ultimate ideal

When people are standing up for our present rotten system, they are being worse than Communists, it seems to me.

Considering the Communist Party of China as a sister party and our closest co-fighter, we have never hidden our views from it. That is why on this major problem which you put before us, we inform you that we consider your decision to receive Nixon in Beijing as incorrect and undesirable, and we do not approve or support it. It will also be our opinion that Nixon's announced visit to China will not be understood or approved of by the peoples, the revolutionaries and the communists of different countries.

It's always been hard for me to understand how we say people who support Osama Bin Laden or someone else like him – who are willing to give their lives to destroy the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia – how we can describe those people as people who hated freedom. It seems to me that their definition of freedom might be different than ours, but to oppose a dictatorship, one must want freedom in some kind of way.

We must recognize that our objectives and the Kremlin's objectives are irreconcilable. The Kremlin wants to promote Communist dictatorships controlled from Moscow, whereas we want, as far as possible to see a world of governments responsive to the will of the people.

Without government institutions, what would the anarchists have to anarchy about?

We Communists are like seeds and the people are like the soil. Wherever we go, we must unite with the people, take root and blossom among them.

Ours is a people's democratic dictatorship, led by the working class and based on the worker-peasant alliance.

Marxism comprises many principles, but in the final analysis they can all be brought back to a single sentence: it is right to rebel.

To begin to know the philosophy of socialism, in backward countries where the class differences are great, very great, and terribly exaggerated over the conditions we know in this country, to overcome this, the theory of revolution, of force and violence, was necessary within those political conditions. It couldn't be anything else.

Progressive, radical, or even revolutionary change has always come from below.

A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage -- the political paradise of communism.

His [Marx's] most explosive and indeed most original contribution to the cause of revolution was that he interpreted the compelling needs of mass poverty in political terms as an uprising, not for the sake of bread or wealth, but for the sake of freedom as well.