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In the quarter-century since the fall of Communism, we’ve forgotten what a cynical, unprincipled, authoritarian Russian regime looks like, especially one with an audacious global strategy and no qualms whatsoever about sacrificing human life.

— Anne Applebaum Russia and the Great Forgetting (2015)

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Communism

More quotes by Anne Applebaum

Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity [...].

Twilight of Democracy (2020)

The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine.

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (2017)

The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to China, Russia, and other autocracies is very long.

Putin’s overt attempt to destroy a political opponent has a logic: If [Alexei] Navalny is showing his countrymen how to be courageous, Putin wants to show them that courage is useless.

If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.

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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: Anne Applebaum (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.