Enver Hoxha Quotes

We became convinced that, regardless of Stalin's awful brutality and his reign of terror, he was a great war leader. Without Stalin, they never would have held.

Even now we feel that Stalin was devoted to Communism, he was a Marxist, this cannot and should not be denied.

Having for centuries had no sense of self esteem outside the state, we found ourselves wanting our old rulers back, the rulers who provided a sense of order, inspired patriotic fervor and the belief that we were great nation. We yearned for monumental--if repressive--leaders like Ivan the Terrible or Stalin. Yes they killed and imprisoned but how great were our victories and parades. So what if Stalin ruled by fear? That was simply a fear of one’s life. However terrifying, it was not as existentially threatening as the fear of freedom, of individual choice, with no one but oneself to blame if democracy turned into disarray and capitalism into corruption.

Yesterday Kerensky; today Lenin and Trotsky; another tomorrow.

I consider it no longer possible to carry out my duties as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Union and I relinquish corresponding authority.

Now that the great revolution has come one feels that however intelligent Lenin may be he begins to fade beside the genius of Trotsky

Heaven’s Yes. I was hopelessly naïve regarding Joseph Stalin. I thought he just drove too hard.

The Soviet Union has indeed been our greatest menace — not so much because of what it has done, but because of the excuses it has provided us for our own failures.

Comrade Stalin showed us how to build socialism in a backward country: it's painful to begin with, but afterwards everything turns out just fine.

Believe it or not, some Western analysts in the 1930s insisted that Stalin was a 'moderate,' controlled by extremists like the secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov.

[Khrushchev] should get a one-ton medal.

Those who warned that Gorbachev was being put under too much pressure were wrong.

I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten.

Can and must! The proclamation of this new conception of [Joseph Stalin] is closed by the same words, "Such are in general the characteristic features of Lenin's conception of the proletarian revolution." In the course of a single year Stalin ascribed to [Vladimir] Lenin two directly opposed conceptions of the fundamental question of socialism. The first version represents the real tradition of the party; the second took shape in Stalin's mind only after the death of Lenin, in the course of the struggle against "Trotskyism".

Only in the Fall of 1924 did [Joseph] Stalin discover that it is especially Russia, as distinguished from other countries, which can by its own forces build up a socialist society.

Great men are never sufficiently shown but in struggles.

In Soviet Russia, party always finds you!

They [the union] were members of the Communist Party - they didn't care one way or another about Russia, they just cared about the United States.

Dalton Trumbo was constantly criticizing the membership [in the Communist Party], and was opposite to being a loyalist.

I can deal with Stalin. He is honest, but smart as hell.

We who are members of the Communist Party repudiate the exclusive identification of democracy with capitalism. We declare that democracy can be widened, take on new aspects, become truly a rule of the people, only when it is extended to the economic life of the people, as in the Soviet Union. As far as women are concerned, the U.S.S.R. is a trailblazer for equal rights and equal opportunities.

We Communists must be able to integrate ourselves with the masses in all things. If our Party members spend their whole lives sitting indoors and never go out to face the world and brave the storm, what good will they be to the Chinese people? None at all, and we do not need such people as Party members. We Communists ought to face the world and brave the storm the great world of mass struggle and the mighty storm of mass struggle.

The China of the 1970s was a communist dictatorship. The China of the twenty-first century is a one-party state without a firm ideological foundation, more similar to Mexico under the PRI than Russia under Stalin. But the measurement of the political and the economic evolution has not yet been completed, and is one of the weak points of the system.

At that time [1954], as a result of political events, I was deeply preoccupied by my relations with the Communist Party.

It is a grave error for any leader to be oversensitive in the face of criticism