SAS: Quotes from comrades

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Mondays can be hard. To help you get through the week ahead, we've put together a list of inspirational quotes from our socialist heroes around the globe.

1. “No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies!” Lenin (Soviet revolutionary leader) 

2. “A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon – authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire…” Friedrich Engels (socialist philosopher and businessman) 

3. “I am not seriously alarmed by the sufferings of the creditor class, the troubles which the church is bound to encounter...A better economic order is worth a little bloodshed.” Stuart Chase (American technocrat, economist, and engineer)

4. "The state machine, including the army, the police and the courts, is the instrument with which one class oppresses another. It is an instrument of oppression against all hostile classes; it means violence and is certainly not anything ‘benevolent.’ ‘You are merciless.’ Quite so. We definitely do not adopt a benevolent policy towards the reactionary activities of the reactionaries and the reactionary classes.” Mao Zedong (Chinese revolutionary leader) 

5. "When violence is exercised by the working people, by the mass of exploited against the exploiters -- then we are for it!" Lenin (Soviet revolutionary leader) 

6. "A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another." Mao Zedong (Chinese revolutionary leader) 

7. “When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.” Mao Zedong (Chinese revolutionary leader) 

8. “We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination, as the immediate task of the coming revolutionary action.” Lenin (Soviet revolutionary leader) 

9. “We executed many people by firing squad without knowing if they were fully guilty. At times, the Revolution cannot stop to conduct much investigation.” Che Guvera (Marxist revolutionary and guerrilla fighter)