Revolutionary Leadership Quotes

The People's democratic dictatorship needs the leadership of the working class. For it is only the working class that is most far-sighted, most selfless and most thoroughly revolutionary. The entire history of revolution proves that without the leadership of the working class revolution fails and that with the leadership of the working class revolution triumphs.

Chairman Mao creatively applied Marxism-Leninism to every aspect of the Chinese revolution, and he had creative views on philosophy, political science, military science, literature and art, and so on. Unfortunately, in the evening of his life, particularly during the "Cultural Revolution", he made mistakes - and they were not minor ones - which brought many misfortunes upon our Party, our state and our people.

His [Lenin’s] love of the proletariat was the same despotic, exacting, and merciless love with which, centuries ago, Torquemada burned people for their salvation.

The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old regime. Only the guiding layers of a class have a political program, and even this still requires the test of events and the approval of the masses.

Comrade Kim Jong Il energetically led the work of defending and honouring Comrade Kim Il Sung's ideas of and exploits in the Juche-oriented women's movement.

Simon Bolivar belongs to the band of modern men whose equals are to be found only when we reach back to republican times of Greece and Rome... In the midst of people who had no more tradition than the respect for an authority sanctioned by the acquiescence of three centuries of ignorance, superstition, and fanaticism, nor any political dogma but submission to an order of things supported by might and force, Bolivar succeeded in defying that power

Transcending class distinctions, the speaker [Stalin] portrays the relation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as a mere division of labor. The workers and soldiers achieve the revolution, Guchkov and Miliukov "fortify" it.[...] This superintendent's approach to the historical process is exactly characteristic of the leaders of Menshevism, this handing out of instructions to various classes and then patronizingly criticizing their fulfillment.

Nothing can compare with the untiring activity of that leader. His fearlessness and his talents entitle him to his place at the head of the revolution and of the war; but he possesses as well, from his noble Spanish strain and his education, also Spanish, qualities of elegance and generosity which elevate him far above all who surround him. He is the revolution...Bolivar is an indominatable soul whom a single victory of the smallest nature is enough to make master of five hundred leagues of territory.

Students at Kim Il Sung University are reserve hardcore talents who will become leading officials of the revolution responsible for the important sectors and posts in the building of a powerful socialist country, the backbone in the struggle for the victory of the Juche revolution.

Giap was a master of logistics, but his reputation rests on more than that. His victories were achieved by a patient strategy that he and Ho Chi Minh were convinced would succeed - an unwavering resolve to suffer immense casualties and the near total destruction of their country to defeat any adversary, no matter how powerful.

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

Revolutionary leadership requires resistance to corruption.

In order for a president to be transformational, the old order has to fall as the orthodoxies that kept it in power exhaust themselves.

Who, if not the revolutionary intelligentsia, could promote the political development of the working class?

The sun flag of the great Comrade Kim Il Sung and Comrade Kim Jong Il will forever flutter in the van of our revolutionary ranks that display only victory and honor and will always encourage and drive us toward a new victory.

The great leaders called the working class first whenever difficult and gigantic tasks arose for the revolution, and ushered in fresh heydays of the revolution by relying on them.

Passive fatalism can never be the role of a revolutionary party, like the Social Democracy.

If there is to be a revolution, there must be a revolutionary party.

A revolution can be neither made nor stopped. The only thing that can be done is for one of several of its children to give it a direction by dint of victories.

But the question is to find and rear leaders that are really one with the masses. This can only be accomplished by the masses, the political parties and the Trade Unions, by means of the most severe struggle, also inwardly.

Simon Bolivar, when history led him - and as Karl Marx said, men can make history, but only as far as history allows us to do so - when history took Bolivar and made him the leader of the independence process in Venezuela, he made that process revolutionary.

A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education.

In my idea General Washington is the greatest man; for I look upon him as the most virtuous.

My personal influence in the Revolutionary Governing Council is such that the dictatorship of the proletariat is firmly established, since the masses are backing me.

Revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.