Donald Sassoon Quotes

What is Communism? The Soviet Republic plus electrification.

Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.

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

[Popular Front policy] implied a wholesale overthrow of the basic principles of communism. Instead of the class struggle, cooperation with the bourgeoisie. Instead of the Soviet system, eulogy of democracy. Instead of internationalism, nationalism.

Marxist revolutions generally happened in countries that otherwise could not have carried out an industrial revolution.

The modernizing elite in the technologically and economically poor nations responded to colonialism by seizing the power of the state and using it to change their societies, hoping to achieve justice at home and economic and cultural parity abroad. The politics of changing traditional social structures and processes by using state power did not always result in social progress and economic development, but it did lead to state supremacy and autocracy. In the more extreme cases autocratic regimes were transformed to either forward-looking or reactionary totalitarianism-of socialist-Marxist, fascist, or religious-fundamentalist types. These systems clearly failed or are failing. But at the time they were adopted, to many they represented hope and a promise of economic change, distributive justice, and a better future.

The duty of an American churchman in China is not simply introducing new ideas into the country, but modifying its industrial, social, and political life and institutions. Missionaries are the pioneers of trade and commerce. Civilization, learning, instruction breed new wants which commerce supplies.

The Japanese keenly learned from Western civilisation in a bid to modernize and preserve the nation.

I want Chinese history to remember me as Carnegie is remembered. I want Chinese people to remember me as they remember Marx and Lenin.

The big successful Communist revolutions occurred in poor agrarian societies–Russia in 1917 and China in 1949–not in industrialized societies, as Marx had predicted.

Most of them are military commanders, country notables and landowners, and educated people. It is inconceivable that such a group should incline to the theory of Communism. But if Western countries persist in applying unjust pressure, they may well throw themselves into Russia’s arms.

For us in Russia communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

In Russia bureaucracy as the ruling class is master of production and produce, and the Russian workers are an exploited class.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draw all, even the most barbarian of nations into civilization.

The Revolution in America signaled the beginning of a new political era, that this revolution would necessarily determine an important progress in world civilization and that before long, it would cause great changes in the social order which then existed in Europe.

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

America…could within twenty years bring us to a degree of development which Turks, left to themselves, would not be able to achieve in a century. It would make Turkey prosperous, rich and happy and turn Turks into a strong and civilized nation.

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.

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

It cannot be so very surprising that I adopted a Communist viewpoint in the 1930s; so many of my contemporaries made the same choice. But many of those who made that choice in those days changed sides when some of the worst features of Stalinism became apparent. I stayed the course.

I would say practical progressive, which means that the Republican party or any political party has got to recognize the problems of a growing and complex industrial civilization. And I don't think the Republican party is really wide awake to that.

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

For many societies, the journey to modernity has been painful and costly.

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 country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.