Revolutionaries

"The revolutionary can have no friendship or attachment, except for those who have proved by their actions that they, like him, are dedicated to revolution."

"The Jews will become socialist colonisers with strong fists and sharp teeth, a strong national group within the Soviet family of nations."

"You must remember that we persecute nobody for religion. We regard religion as an error and fight it with education."

"If you are called upon to govern humans, treat them humanely."

"The contingencies of the moment may justify the omission of certain conveniences in the building of temporary accommodations."

"These [traits] are first: love, love for his people, love for the working masses...Second, honesty...Third, courage...Fourth, comradely solidarity...Fifth, love for labor. Not only love but an honest attitude to labor, firmly bearing in mind that if a man lives, eats and does not work, this means that he eats someone else's labor."

"The whole history of my life, and in essence the whole history of the working class consists of this: that we have lived and fought under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin."

"But even now, after the greatest victory known to history we cannot for one minute forget the basic fact that our country remains the one socialist state in the world. You will speak frankly about this to the collective farmers...Only the most concrete, most immediate danger, which threatened us from Hitlerite Germany, has disappeared."

"For thousands of years humankind's finest minds have been struggling with the theoretical problem of finding the forms that would give peoples the possibility, without the greatest of torment, without internecine strife, of living side by side in friendship and brotherhood. Practically speaking, the first step in this direction is only being taken now, today."

"The national question is purely a peasant question...the best way to eliminate nationality is a massive factory with thousands of workers..., which like a millstone grinds up all nationalities and forges a new nationality. This nationality is the universal proletariat."

"If we could export more finished products instead of raw materials, we could become a middle-income country."

"One of Museveni's defining early pronouncements was his diagnosis of Africa's problem. Africa's problem, he would say, was leaders who did not want to leave power."

"The western countries should stop wasting the time of humanity by trying to impose their practices on other people. Homosexuals are deviations from the normal. Why? Is it by nature or by nurture? We need to answer those questions. We need a medical opinion on that."

"If there is no bread eat mwogo (cassava). Africans really confuse themselves. You’re complaining that there's no bread or wheat, please eat mwogo. I don’t eat bread myself..."

"Of course. They're disgusting. What sort of people are they? I never knew what they were doing. I've been told recently that what they do is terrible. Disgusting."

"Some people think that being in government for a long time is a bad thing. But the more you stay, the more you learn. I am now an expert in governance."

"The island is in Kenya, the water is in Uganda... But the [Luos, a Kenyan ethnic group] are mad, they want to fish here but this is Uganda."

"You cannot, for instance, sustainably protect the environment if the majority of the people are still in primitive agriculture leading to the encroachment of forest reserves."

"I shall not be deterred by people who don't see where the future of Africa lies. It is the short-sighted people who put their opinions in writing. They don't understand that the future of all countries lies in processing."

"I've never heard an agency say: "Unless you industrialize I will not support you.""

"When we sell a kilo of bean coffee in Uganda, we get one dollar per kilo. The same kilo, when it is processed [and sold in the UK], goes for $10, $11 or even more a kilo. That is the same situation [price disparity] that goes for all raw materials."

"Africa is wealthy in natural resources; the problem is they are not optimally utilized."

"In 1972, Idi Amin expelled 80,000 [Ugandan] Indians and confiscated their 4,000 properties. Now, after returning those properties to their rightful owners, we have ensured that security of persons and property are guaranteed under the constitution."

"Even when we were still fighting in the bush against the oppressive dictatorships of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, we introduced elections for the committees of the villages under our control."

"If General Omar el Bashir's government gives me permission to pursue Kony beyond the red line, it will only take me 30 minutes to finish him and his fighters."

"Some people say accident; it may be an accident. It may be something else. The [helicopter] was very well equipped, this was my [helicopter] the one I am flying all the time, I am not ruling anything out. Either the pilot panicked... [E]ither there was some side wind or the instruments failed or there was an external factor."

"This is not a mere change of guards, I think this is a fundamental change in the politics of our government."

"We fought a lonely battle against terrorism sponsored by Sudan, and we have defeated it; we cannot be intimidated by any force. For us our guide is the Constitution of Uganda and the laws there under."

"In the mater of education as in all other matters the Communist Party is not merely faced by constructive tasks. In the educational system bequeathed to it by capitalist society, it must hasten to destroy everything which has made of the school an instrument of capitalist rule."

"There have been communist leaders – and not just ones whose parties failed to come to power – who moderated their zeal for full communisation. They have included individuals who in their private lives would not deliberately hurt a fly. One such was Bukharin, animal lover, mountain walker and painter. But kindly Bukharin did not abjure dictatorship and terror in principle, and he condoned most of the violence perpetrated by the Bolsheviks in the early years of the Soviet state."

"At the Twelfth Party Congress in Moscow in 1923, Nikolia Bukharin stressed that the Nazi Party had ‘inherited Bolshevik political culture exactly as Italian Fascism had done.’ On June 20, 1923, Karl Radek gave a speech before the Comintern Executive Committee proposing a common front with the Nazis in Germany."

"An atmosphere of extreme tension reigned during this period; it was necessary to act without mercy. I think that it was justified. If Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Rykov and Zinoviev had started up their opposition in wartime, there would have been an extremely difficult struggle; the number of victims would have been colossal. Colossal. The two sides would have been condemned to disaster. They had links that went right up to Hitler. That far. Trotsky had similar links, without doubt. Hitler was an adventurist, as was Trotsky, they had traits in common. And the rightists, Bukharin and Rykov, had links with them. And, of course, many of the military leaders."

"Speaking of the young C.C. members, I wish to say a few words about Bukharin and Pyatakov. They are, in my opinion, the most outstanding figures (among the youngest ones), and the following must be borne in mind about them: Bukharin is not only a most valuable and major theorist of the Party; he is also rightly considered the favourite of the whole Party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve, for there is something scholastic about him (he has never made a study of the dialectics, and, I think, never fully understood it)."

"Sociology was not exactly banned in the Soviet Union, but the name of the discipline had been reduced to something like a curse word. Lenin himself had inaugurated it as a Soviet insult. The problem with sociology was much the same as with psychoanalysis: the field of study refused to be a “science” that could be used to create a new society of new men. A year before the Philosophers’ Ship sailed, one of Lenin’s closest allies, Nikolai Bukharin, published The Theory of Historical Materialism, an attempt at a sort of Marxist textbook of everything, written in a folksy language intended for the proletariat. Three things that Bukharin did in this textbook proved deadly for Soviet sociology: he included new ideas that he believed advanced Marxist theory, he subtitled it A Popular Textbook of Marxist Sociology, and he proclaimed the supreme importance of sociology among the social sciences because it “examines not some one aspect of public life but all of public life in all its complexity.” Lenin hated the book, and the word “sociology” took the brunt of his rage. He underlined it throughout the book and supplied a small variety of comments in the margins: “Haha!” “Eclectic!” “Help!” and the like. In another eight years, when Bukharin was deposed in a Party power struggle, Stalin recalled Lenin’s skepticism by describing Bukharin’s work as possessed of “the hypertrophied pretentiousness of a half-baked theoretician.” Bukharin was eventually executed. Much earlier, sociology had had to go into hiding."

"Military industry was encouraged by an ideology of hostility to foreign states and influences that characterised even Communist moderates. The extent to which Stalin’s rise to power was supported by a military high command concerned by the efforts of the fiscally conservative Communist Right, such as Nicolay Bukharin (also an opponent of collectivisation), to resist the rise in military spending was also relevant. All these factors together contributed to and interacted with an extensive development of Soviet military industry. Stalin was eager to back the industrialisation necessary for large-scale mechanisation of the army. He regarded powerful military forces as a way to defend the Revolution against the allegedly implacably hostile capitalist states, especially Britain and Japan. Moreover, his support for Socialism in one state was not inherently pacific, as he used the idea of international crisis to press for an extension of state dominance, notably with the war scare of 1927, which he did not try to defuse. Bukharin, a prominent member of the Politburo in 1924–9, was arrested in 1937. After a show-trial, he was shot in 1938."

"The foundations of a Communist society are laid by the organization of industry, and first of all by purposeful unification of industry under state control."

"It is true that these courts will gradually change in character. As the state dies out, they will tend to become simply organs for the expression of public opinion. They will assume the character of courts of arbitration. Their decisions will no longer be enforced by physical means and will have a purely moral significance."

"The Red Army has been created by the workers for the struggle with the White Army of capital. The Red Army issued out the civil war; it will disappear when a complete victory has been gained in the war, when class has been abolished when the dictatorship of the proletariat has lapsed."

"Our ultimate aim is to bring about the existence of a state of society in which all persons who for one reason or another have lost the capacity for work, all those who are unable to work, shall have assured support. We must ensure that old people shall enjoy a peaceful old age in which they will be provided with all the comforts of life; that children shall have everything suitable to their requirements; that invalids and cripples shall be able to live in the circumstances most appropriate to their condition; that those who are wearied and overworked shall be placed in curative surroundings, where they will receive all the care that used to be given to the wealthy bourgeois who were ailing; that no one shall any longer be perpetually harassed with anticipation of hard times."

"The great majority of crimes committed in bourgeois society are either direct infringements of property rights or are indirectly connected with property."

"In the sanguinary struggle with capitalism, the working class cannot refrain from inflicting the last extremity of punishment upon its declared enemies. While the civil war continues, the abolition of the death penalty is impossible."

"In the old law-courts, the class minority of exploiters passed judgement upon the working majority. The law-courts of the proletarian dictatorship are places where the working majority passes judgement upon the exploiting minority."

"During this era when the old society is being destroyed and the new society is being upbuilded, the popular courts have a gigantic task to perform. The process of change has been so rapid that soviet legislation has not been able to keep pace with it. The laws of the bourgeois landlord system have been annulled; but the laws of the proletarian State have as yet merely been outlined, and will never be committed to paper in their entirety."

"In all grades of army life, the proletariat is in control through the instrumentality of the communist commissars, who both at the front and at the rear are mainly drawn from among the workers."

"The political commissars are the representatives of the class will of the proletariat in the army; they are mandated by the party and the military centres."

"In our system of universal military training, barrack life must be reduced to a minimum, so that ultimately the Red barracks may completely disappear."

"In the Russian Soviet Republic, in which all workers can express their will through the soviets, the workers and peasants have for the last two years been electing communists to the various executive organs."

"The proletarian army must be exclusively composed of persons belonging to the working class, of persons who do not expoloit labour and who are directly interested in the victory of the workers' revolution."

"The Russian bourgeoisie raised the hunt against the Jews, not only in the hope of diverting the anger of the exploited workers, but also in the hope of freeing themselves from competitors in commerce and industry."

"One of the worst forms of national enmity is antisemitism, that is to say, racial hostility towards the Jews, who belong to Semitic stock (of which the Arabs forms another great branch). The Tsarist autocracy raised the hunt against the Jews in the hope of averting the workers' and peasants' revolution."