“The American Communist Party is not an autonomous body. Its members, who claim their rights under the American Constitution have already relinquished every personal right to an international, actually Russian, body. Their claim to participate in the political life of America is as preposterous as would be the claim of the Jugoslav Communist Party to participate, because the American, Russian, Jugoslav, Bulgarian, etc., parties are all the same organization.”

— Dorothy Thompson

Source: "Let the Record Speak" 1939, “The Truth about Communism” https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015051180423&view=1up&seq=5 (1948), p. 2

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The American Communist Party is not an autonomous body. Its members, who claim their rights under the American Constitu…" by Dorothy Thompson?

Dorothy Thompson photo

Dorothy Thompson77

American journalist and radio broadcaster 1893–1961

Related quotes

“On condition that you protect my rights, I will protect your rights. How, then, does some party obtain the right to claim the protection of the other? Evidently, by actually protecting the rights of the other. But if this is so, no party will ever obtain a strictly legal claim to the protection of the other.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Science of Rights 1796, P. 220

“The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.”

Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) American writer

"In a Manner that Must Shame God Himself"
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974)

“As you know, I am not a writer but a Party functionary. But like every Communist I consider myself to have been mobilized by Party propaganda and deem it my duty to participate actively in the work of our press.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

As quoted in Reprints from the Soviet Press (1977), p. 5

“The Communist Party must be a revolutionary party our it will cease to be a Communist Party.”

Tim Buck (1891–1973) Canadian politician

Tim Buck A Conscience for Canada

“Lenin's thesis is that the party Central Committee should have the privilege of naming all the local committees of the party. It should have the right to appoint the effective organs of all local bodies from Geneva to Liege, from Tomsk to Irkutsk. It should also have the right to impose on all of them its own ready-made rules of party conduct. It should have the right to rule without appeal on such questions as the dissolution and reconstitution of local organizations. This way, the Central Committee could determine, to suit itself, the composition of the highest party organs. The Central Committee would be the only thinking element in the party. All other groupings would be its executive limbs.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Leninism or Marxism? (1904)

“Translation:In many places, bandits had begun to infiltrate peasants movement, gradually bandits directly are helping the peasant's struggle, this is a fact that we communist party members should be aware of the relationship between party members and bandits. We(communist party members) should infiltrate among the bandits…. we can organize them into the struggle of revolution.”

Wang Ming (1904–1974) Chinese politician

“I think it's already apparent that a good part of this Nation understands — if only instinctively — that anything which seems to suggest that God favors a political party or the establishment of a state church, is wrong and dangerous.
Way down deep the American people are afraid of an entangling relationship between formal religions — or whole bodies of religious belief — and government. Apart from constitutional law and religious doctrine, there is a sense that tells us it's wrong to presume to speak for God or to claim God's sanction of our particular legislation and His rejection of all other positions. Most of us are offended when we see religion being trivialized by its appearance in political throw-away pamphlets.
The American people need no course in philosophy or political science or church history to know that God should not be made into a celestial party chairman.”

Mario Cuomo (1932–2015) American politician, Governor of New York

Religious Belief and Public Morality (1984)

“In the interest of the entire nation we decline the claim to power by parties which want to own their followers body and soul, and which want to put themselves, as a party or a movement, over and above the whole nation.”

Franz von Papen (1879–1969) German chancellor

Quoted in "Nazi conspiracy and aggression, Vol. 6" - Page 3 - 1946
1940s

“No oath of office or obligation of duty demands that a particular political party be supported, preserved, defended, protected, and adhered to — because no political party defines what an American is.”

Larisa Alexandrovna (1971) Ukrainian-American journalist, essayist, poet

You Are An American http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larisa-alexandrovna/you-are-an-american_b_5928.html.

“The rigors of membership in the Progress Labor Party and its Stalinist tendencies only create a mental brick wall for the members of the sect. The Progress Labor Party and its vacuum-minded Communists should not be marked for government control merely because they are Communists. The illegal actions of PL do,…”

Phillip Abbott Luce (1935–1998)

Source: The New Left: The Resurgence of Radicalism Among American Students (1966), p. 103

Related topics