#stalin

It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#fascism #freedom #society #stalinism #totalitarianism

If our enemies take me And people stop talking to me, If they confiscate the whole world— The right to breathe, open doors, Affirm that existence shall go on And that people, like a judge, shall judge, And if they dare to keep me like an animal And fling my food on the floor, I won’t fall silent or deaden the agony, But shall write what I am free to write, My naked body gathering momentum like a bell, And in a corner of the ominous dark I shall yoke ten oxen to my voice And move my hand in the darkness like a plough And, wrung out into a legion of brotherly eyes, Shall fall with the full heaviness of a harvest, Exploding in the distance with all the force of a vow, And in the depths of the unguarded night The eyes of that unskilled laborer, earth, shall shine And a flock of flaming years swoop down, And like a ripe thunderstorm Lenin shall burst forth. But on this earth (which shall escape decay) There to wake up life and reason will be ↗

— Osip Mandelstam

#food

Because of my parents' love of democracy, we came to America after being driven twice from our home in Czechoslovakia - first by Hitler and then by Stalin. ↗

— Madeleine Albright

#america #because #being #came #czechoslovakia

...we're dealing with two devils who both want to rule hell. ↗

— Ruta Sepetys

#quotes #ruta-sepetys #soviet-occupation #stalin #world-war-ii

What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland. I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#eastern-european #ernest-gellner #ethnic-cleansing #genocide #germans

Not only the priceless heritage of our fathers, of our seamen, of our Empire builders is being thrown away in a war that serves no British interests - but our alliance leader Stalin dreams of nothing but the destruction of that heritage of our fathers? ↗

— John Amery

#away #being #british #builders #destruction

The way the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands, is as good as Stalin or Hitler. ↗

— Mario Batali

#distributed #good #hands #hitler #into

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin. ↗

— Harold Bloom

#am #criticism #entered #goes #i

Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again. ↗

— Lionel Blue

#cracked #early #i #idolatry #open

I worry that we are approaching a time when that which is shocking is squeezed out by the Stalinism of political correctness. ↗

— Joe Eszterhas

#correctness #i #out #political #political correctness