~ Joseph Stalin:

“Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.”
— “The Press as Collective Organiser,” Pravda, 6 May 1923.

“We must smash the kulaks, eliminate them as a class.”
— speech on agrarian policy, 27 December 1929; the words preceded the deportation and death of millions. [VERIFY translation against the published Works]

“To choose one’s victims, to prepare one’s plan minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed — there is nothing sweeter in the world.”
— as reported by his biographer Boris Souvarine, who records Stalin saying it in 1923. Reported, not documented.

Mao Zedong:

“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
— Problems of War and Strategy, November 6, 1938.

“It is necessary to create terror for a while in every rural area.”
— Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, 1927.

“Deaths have benefits. They can fertilise the ground.”
— remarks during the Great Leap Forward, 1958, party records cited by historians Frank Dikötter & Jung Chang.

Karl Marx

“The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
— The Communist Manifesto, 1848, chapter 2.

“They [Communists] openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”
— The Communist Manifesto, 1848, closing paragraphs.

Friederich Engels:

Adolf Hitler:

“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp.’”
— speech at Reichenberg, 6 November 1933; quoted in William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

“All propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas… Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd.”
— Mein Kampf (1925), volume 1, chapter 6.

“The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous.”
— Mein Kampf, volume 1, chapter 6.

Vladimir Lenin:

“Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers… Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts around, the people will see, tremble, know, shout.”
— telegram to Penza, 11 August 1918. The document survives and was displayed in the Library of Congress exhibition Revelations from the Russian Archives.

A deed rather than a quotation: within two days of taking power, the Decree on the Press of 9 November 1917 closed the opposition newspapers. [VERIFY the decree’s published wording]

Che Guevara:

“Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine.”
— Message to the Tricontinental, 1967.

“Executions? Yes, we have executed, we execute, and we will continue to execute.”
— address to the United Nations General Assembly, 11 December 1964.

[Needs to be verified:] "To execute a man we don't need proof of his guilt. We only need proof that it's necessary to execute him. It's that simple." "A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredón [execution wall]."

Fidel Castro:

“The first thing dictators do is finish free press, to establish censorship.”
— said to American journalists in 1959, newly in power. He ruled Cuba for the next half-century, and journalists were jailed throughout. [VERIFY the 1959 interviews]

Joseph Goebbels:

“Do you want total war? Do you want it, if necessary, more total and more radical than we can even imagine it today?” — and they roared yes.
— Germany had just lost the Sixth Army at Stalingrad. On 18 February 1943 Goebbels put the question to a hand-picked crowd in the Berlin Sportpalast.

·        ALTERNATIVE, if a colder line is wanted: use the published diaries — Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, edited by Elke Fröhlich — where the entries are dated and citable. [VERIFY: select the entry and cite volume and date before use]

Heinrich Himmler:

“Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses lie there, or 500 lie there, or 1,000 lie there. To have gone through this and — apart from exceptions caused by human weakness — to have remained decent, that has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and which is never to be written.’”
— Posen, 4 October 1943. A recording of this speech exists; the audio survives and the transcript is published

Leon Trotsky:

“We were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the ‘sacredness of human life.’”
— Terrorism and Communism, 1920. This is the dark mirror of Pillar 7: Intrinsic Worth of the Human Person.

Benito Mussolini:

“Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
— speech at La Scala, Milan, 28 October 1925.

“The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.”
— The Doctrine of Fascism (1932).

Pol Pot:

“To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss.”
— a Khmer Rouge slogan documented in the scholarship on the S-21 prison, notably David Chandler’s Voices from S-21. Attributed to the regime, not to Pol Pot personally.

" ______________"
Pol Pot barely spoke in public. He did not even confirm that a communist party was governing Cambodia until a radio speech in September 1977 — by which time the killing was well under way. Roughly a fifth to a quarter of the country’s people died while its ruler stayed anonymous. On a wall where every other man is quoted, the near-absence of quotable words is itself the exhibit.