Kotkin Stalin Quotes & Sayings

That such lowly beginnings would soon become one of the world's strongest dictatorships is beyond fantastic. Lenin was essentially a pamphleteer. In 1918 he was identified as "Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and journalist," and earned more money from publication honoraria (15,000 rubles) than from his salary (10,000 rubles).17 Trotsky was a writer as well, and a grandiloquent orator, but similarly without experience or training in statecraft. Sverdlov was something of an amateur forger, thanks to his father's engraving craft, and a crack political organizer but hardly an experienced policy maker. Stalin was also an organizer, a rabble-rouser, and, briefly, a bandit, but primarily a periodicals editor - commissar of nationalities was effectively his first regular employment since his brief stint as a teenage Tiflis weatherman. Now, — Stephen Kotkin

I think I am at my best when my hair is short. It's easier to take care of and more of who I am. Women are conditioned to think we need long hair. — Halle Berry

We do need our defense capabilities. The cuts that Senator [Ted] Cruz would have supported would leave us with an even smaller Air Force and a smaller Navy than the one we are going to be left with. — Marco Rubio

Herein is a capital truth. It is not the natural capacity, the congenital gift, nor is it the effort, the will, the work, which in the intelligence as sway over the energy capable of making it fully efficacious. It is uniquely the desire, that is, the desire for beauty. This desire, given a certain degree of intensity and purity, is the same thing as genius. At all levels it is the same thing as attention. If this were understood, the whole conception of teaching would be quite other than it is. First, one would realize that the intelligence functions only in joy. Intelligence is perhaps even the only one of our faculties to which joy is indispensible. The absence of joy asphyxiates it. — Simone Weil

I was born in 1949 - which seems like a long time ago ... Actually, it is a long time ago, when I think about it. — Rick Wakeman

Muti is going to do the Alpine Symphony this year. He will do it well because it is not very well known. — Eugene Ormandy

Fulfillment of Central Committee directives became Stalin's mantra, and suspicion of non-fulfillment, his obsession. — Stephen Kotkin