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The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.

— Eric Hobsbawm The Age of Extremes (1992)

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Communism

More quotes by Eric Hobsbawm

Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.

Divided Europeans: Understanding Ethnicities in Conflict (1999)

Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.

The Age of Extremes (1992)

As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms.

In the simplest terms the question who or what caused the Second World War can be answered in two words: Adolf Hitler.

The Age of Extremes (1992)

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For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary.

Vladimir Lenin The State and Revolution (1917)

I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.

Bertrand Russell Unarmed Victory (1963)

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.

Friedrich Engels Principles of Communism (1847)

Communism has sometimes succeeded as a scavenger, but never as a leader. It has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.

John F. Kennedy

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Eric Hobsbawm (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.