Mussolini is a man no less extraordinary than Lenin. He, too, is a political genius, of a greater reach than all the statesmen of the day, with the only exception of Lenin…

As quoted in The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarization in the 20th Century, Jacob L. Talmon, University of California Press (1981) p. 451. Sorel’s March 1921 conversations with Jean Variot, published in Variot’s Propos de Georges Sorel, (1935) Paris, pp. 53-57, 66-86 passim