~ Joseph Stalin:

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

“We have passed from the policy of restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks to the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class.”
— “Problems of Agrarian Policy in the U.S.S.R.,” speech to the Conference of Marxist Students of the Agrarian Question, 27 December 1929; Works, volume 12.

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.

“As soon as the new order becomes consolidated, all administrative pressure on the press will be terminated and it will be granted complete freedom within the bounds of legal responsibility, in keeping with a law that will be broadest and most progressive in this respect.” “The present ordinance is of a temporary nature and will be repealed by a special decree as soon as normal conditions of social life set in.”
The decree closed the opposition newspapers within two days of the Bolsheviks taking power, promised the closure was temporary, and the promise was still unkept seventy-four years later. Source line: Decree on the Press, Council of People’s Commissars, 9 November 1917.

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.

Fidel Castro:

“The first thing that dictators do is finish free press, establish censorship. There is no doubt that a free press is the first enemy of dictatorship.
— said to American journalists in 1959, newly in power. Castro ruled Cuba for the next forty-nine years and jailed journalists throughout. Source line: Fidel Castro, National Press Club, Washington, D.C., April 1959.

Joseph Goebbels:

“Regarding the Jewish question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that, if they yet again brought about a world war, they would experience their own annihilation. That was not just a phrase. The world war is here; the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.”
— 13 DECEMBER 1941 (Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich, Teil II, Band 2, p. 498), written the day after the Reich Chancellery meeting.

“Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor.”
— 27 MARCH 1942 (Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich, Teil II, Band 3; Lochner English edition pp. 147–148).

“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.

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.