Fredy Perlman Quotes

… the great mischief-maker Lenin

Lenin, the greatest theorist of them all, did not know what he was going to do after he had got the power.

Yesterday Kerensky; today Lenin and Trotsky; another tomorrow.

You Bollinger Bolshevik, you ritzy Robespierre, you lounge-lizard Lenin. Look at you, swilling Max’s champagne and calling yourself a socialist.

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

Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.

The chief fruit of the First World War was the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism as a national power.

We only need one, in the same way that Lenin only needed one.

For about 20 years we have had practically no collective leadership; there flourished the cult of the individual which was [earlier] condemned first by Marx and then by Lenin

In the early days of the Russian Revolution in 1917, I was completely in sympathy with it. I felt that it established a new era in the history of the modern world. I was so overwhelmed by it that, if people made any unfriendly comment, I would vigorously defend it. If people condemned the Communist party, I would speak in its defense.

Russian Communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great.

It can't work—for Lenin and Trotsky are both extremely unpopular.... Lenin ... will never be able to dominate the Russian people.

The Russian Revolution has demonstrated beyond doubt that the State idea, State Socialism, in all its manifestations ... is entirely and hopelessly bankrupt.

All power to the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.

… perversion of the ethical values soon crystallized into the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party: THE END JUSTIFIES ALL MEANS. Similarly in the past the Inquisition and the Jesuits adopted this motto and subordinated to it all morality. It avenged itself upon the Jesuits as it did upon the Russian Revolution. In the wake of this slogan followed lying, deceit, hypocrisy and treachery, murder, open and secret. It should be of utmost interest to students of social psychology that two movements as widely separated in time and ideas as Jesuitism and Bolshevism reached exactly similar results in the evolution of the principle that the end justifies all means. The historic parallel, almost entirely ignored so far, contains a most important lesson for all coming revolutions and for the whole future of mankind.

Bolshevism must live and die of itself, without pressure from abroad.

Leninism is Marxism of the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution.

I believe, as Lenin said, that this revolutionary chaos may yet crystallize into new forms of life.

First of all, Bolshevism represents revolution and the revolutionary struggle.

The collapse of Russia was the second great event of 1917.

Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.

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.

Bolshevism is the other end of Czarism.

We are the party of the Czechoslovak proletariat and our general headquarters are in Moscow.

Ten days that shook the world.