A. J. P. Taylor Quotes

Only ignoramuses – people who know nothing about history and nothing about Lenin's theory of imperialism – can conceive of imperialism as a phenomenon unique to capitalist society.

Capitalism carries in itself war, like clouds carry rain.

Lenin was a Russian bourgeois who cursed the weakness and ineptitude of the Russian bourgeoisie

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.

Incendiary capitalism is carrying its out evil works more dangerously than ever, and is doing so in the increasingly dangerous neighborhood of the powder kegs that are the great European military powers.

Communists are great capitalists, so there is no threat anymore.

The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class.

How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

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

Capitalism is war; socialism is peace.

Liberation is no longer, and can be no longer, merely a national concern. The dimension of the struggle, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks so clearly saw, is international: its road is the socialist revolution

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

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

It is the historical mission of the Communist International to be the gravedigger of bourgeois society.

Capitalist wars for capitalist conquest and capitalist plunder must be fought by the capitalists themselves so far as I am concerned.

The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the destruction of brick and mortar.

I am on the anti-imperialist left. The Stalinist left? I wouldn't define it that way because of the pejoratives loaded around it; … If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life. If there was a Soviet Union today, we would not be having this conversation about plunging into a new war in the Middle East, and the US would not be rampaging around the globe.

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

Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.”

Stealing from capitalism is not like stealing out of our own pockets. Marx and Lenin have taught us that anything is ethical, so long as it is in the interest of the proletarian class and its world revolution.

Someday, the capitalist system will disappear in the United States, because no social class system has been eternal. One day, class societies will disappear.

I'm a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal, too.

Marx and Lenin were ahead of their time. Marx wrote before offshoring of jobs and the financialization of the economy. Lenin presided over a communist revolution that jumped the gun by taking place in a country in which feudal elements still predominated over capitalism.

While some people have rejected capitalism gladly and swiftly, I've done so slowly and reluctantly. Part of the reason was that I could see no clear alternative: unlike some anti-capitalists, I have never been an enthusiast for state communism.