Wislawa Szymborska Quotes

First of all, let it be remembered that I speak as an ex-Communist and one who has not testified before Congressional Committees, nor written works on the Communist conspiracy.

I once said, 'We will bury you,' and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.

I was an anti-communist before I was political in other ways.

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

I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice... but because of his omnipresent images.

I am one of those people who believes that the solution to the world's problems is to be found behind the Iron Curtain.

The goals of Russia since 1917 have been to destroy capitalism, discredit democracy, and show that Communist collectivism was the greatest social and political system in the world.

I just wanted to see China with my own eyes. I wanted to see whether North Korea was the best country in the world or China was the best. I grew up believing that China was much worse than North Kore, because that's what the regime told us.

My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the 50's.

Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.

One of the wiser clichés of the 20th century stated that if you aren’t a Communist before you are 21, there is something wrong with your heart. If you remain one after you are 21, there is something wrong with your head.

Consider it highly important to mobilize anti-Communist activities of the Catholic Church dignitaries and of Catholic lay organizations.... This could be done, for instance, by describing graphically how the local church would be turned into a meeting hall for the "Fighting Godless," how the reader's children would have to spend their time with the "Red Pioneers," how the pictures of Lenin, Stalin and Malenkov would replace the pictures of the Saints in every home, and the like.

Negotiating with Stalin was like dealing with an octopus.

Russia is enveloped with communism -- a new religious freedom must come. God will overrule it, for that people must hear the truth, and truth in simplicity.

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.

My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the '50s. I apologized for following the party line so slavishly, for not seeing that Stalin was a supremely cruel misleader.

Stalin is a strong, ruthless revolutionist and therefore a very potential threat to future world conditions.

We face a hostile ideology [Communism]—global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method.

We didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left us.

In the old days, the Soviets were using space as a selling point for communism.

Communists love to make films about composers because composers compose music and don't talk subversive things.

We needed 40 years to overcome East Germany. Sometimes in history, one has to be prepared for the long haul and not ask after four months if it still makes sense to keep up our demands.

Nothing upset me more than the award of Companion of Honour to Eric Hobsbawm in reward for a lifetime of unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union.

It's important to remember that, in the 1930s, a lot of people in the West looked at communism as a pretty good idea. That was partly because they didn't know how bad things were on the communist side of the world, but it was also partly because things were bad in the West.

Communism counts its opportunities in terms of decades - not of weeks. Its means of aggression consist not only of nuclear weapons and missiles with enormous boosters, and not only of spies, agents and terrorists, but of great masses of men and women, deluded by a common ideology which inspires them with a false hope.