All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all.

You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.

To picture world history as advancing smoothly and steadily without sometimes taking gigantic strides backward is undialectical, unscientific and theoretically wrong.

Free speech is a bourgeois prejudice.

Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes).

There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.