Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

There could be no greater act of madness than to imagine that we can reform Communists by marrying them.

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

The Russian Bolsheviks sold out most of the hopes of us early communists. The standard of living increased, and education and medicine improved finally after the 1917 Revolution, but the Russians today have as little freedom as we had under the Czar. That is the tragedy of Russia.

I grew up with communism, and if you live through communism you don't love it.

Mao Zedong's way was to make people crazy. It was like a religious cult.

Islam is a totalitarian ideology. It rules every aspect of life — economics, family law, whatever. It has religious symbols, it has a God, it has a book — but it’s not a religion. It can be compared with totalitarian ideologies like Communism or fascism. There is no country where Islam is dominant where you have a real democracy, a real separation between church and state.

As a Christian, I could never accept Communism. It is a crippling totalitarian disease.

The surest way to make our youth suspect that there may be something in Communism would be for the government to outlaw it.

In 1917, with the Bolsheviks, you had intra-elite conversations about what the country should be doing. You had arguments. Under Stalin, you didn’t really. But then after Stalin, you started having those arguments again.

In power for 16 years now, Mr. Putin and his global propaganda machine aggressively promote the idea that democracy is a chaotic mess that only the hero Putin can save Russia from falling into.

A great paradox laid at the heart of the Soviet State. While rapid scientific progress was needed on a mass scale to advance the cost of a Utopian socialist nation, the Soviet regime didn't want to grant the scientific community inside Russia any intellectual freedom or autonomy, fearing that it might end up undermining the science of Marxism,

Scandinavia was awash with Maoism in the '70s. Sweden had Maoist groups with a combined membership and periphery of several thousand members, but it was Norway where Maoism became a genuine popular force and hegemonic in the culture.

Just as Chairman Mao and Joseph Stalin started by going after the intellectuals, against those whose words who might form an opposition to them, so Trump has gone across us. Free speech is first among equals when we look at what is being violated by this new regime.

Nothing is more false than the notion that the triumph of Communism is inevitable or that the Communists are steadily pushing the free world into a corner.

After the Revolution in '49, all the films were propaganda. They serviced the government and carried the message that the government wants to relay to the people. But I think, in the last 10 years, because the film market is opening and there's an expansion of all the cinemas in China, it's now a lot like Hollywood productions.

Even if the country is run by a Mussolini, free speech will find its way.

I love the good Russian world, the humanitarian Russian world, but I do not love the Russian world of Beria, Stalin, and Shoigu.

In fact, there is an academic blackout about the atrocities perpetrated in the name of communism and socialism.

My ideas are threatening to the government.

I suppose anyone who calls a dictator a dictator is 'dangerous' and 'imbalanced.'

During the entire communist era, communist ideology was imposed on children. That was Bolshevism.

Every country in history that has gone down dark paths, where governments take on too much control and really intervene and take away those freedoms, often start with an attack on the freedom to disagree.

But if by some freak of history communism had caught up with this country, I would have been one of the first people thrown in jail.

I have come to communism because of daddy Stalin and nobody must come and tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin. I read him when it was very bad to read him. That was another time. And because I’m not very bright, and a hard-headed person, I keep on reading him. Especially in this new period, now that it is worse to read him. Then, as well as now, I still find a Seri of things that are very good.

How a man who holds the entire population of a country as his prisoners, and punishes the families of those who escape, can be admired by people who call themselves liberals is one of the many wonders of the human mind's ability to rationalize. Yet such is the case with Fidel Castro.