“Vladimir Putin is a thug and a killer who in the grand tradition of Russian autocracy has no intention ever of holding free elections.”
2010s, Why Does the Left Suddenly Hate Russia? (2017)
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Victor Davis Hanson 41
American military historian, essayist, university professor 1953Related quotes
Twitter post https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/984074028817281026 (11 April 2018)
2010s, 2018
“Vladimir Ilyich, your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.”
Letter to Vladimir Lenin (21 December 1920); as quoted in Peter Kropotkin : From Prince to Rebel (1990) by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, p. 426
Variant translation: Whoever holds dear the future of communism cannot embark upon such measures.
It is possible that no one has explained what a hostage really is? A hostage is imprisoned not as punishment for some crime. He is held in order to blackmail the enemy with his death.
As translated in Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution (1970) edited and translated by Martin A. Miller http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/kropotlenindec20.html
Context: Vladimir Ilyich, your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.
Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? … If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done in the Middle Ages.
I hope you will not answer me that Power is for political men a professional duty, and that any attack against that power must be considered as a threat against which one must guard oneself at any price. This opinion is no longer held even by kings... Are you so blinded, so much a prisoner of your own authoritarian ideas, that you do not realise that being at the head of European Communism, you have no right to soil the ideas which you defend by shameful methods … What future lies in store for Communism when one of its most important defenders tramples in this way every honest feeling?
“You are the sweetest thug I've ever known.”
Variant: Have I mentioned you are the hottest geek I've ever known?
Source: Lover Unleashed
April 29, 1945. Quoted in "U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis" - Page 150 - by Richard Breitman, Norman J. W. Goda, Timothy Naftali, Robert Wolfe - History - 2005
“How many people you know who can name every serial killer who ever existed in a row?”
2000s, Relapse (2009)
“The trouble with free elections is, you never know who is going to win.”
This was quoted as an anonymous saying heard in Moscow around the time of the first Russian elections, in Voltaire, Goldberg & Others : A Compendium of the Witty, the Profound and the Absurd (2000), p. 201; it was later attributed to Brezhnev in Brewer's Famous Quotations: 5000 Quotations and the Stories Behind Them (2006) by Nigel Rees, p. 441, but without citations, and it is clearly derived from a statement widely attributed to Vyacheslav Molotov as early as the 1954 Berlin Conference, according to an eyewitness writing in International Affairs Vol. 36 (1960), p. 4 : "The trouble with free elections is that you never know how they are going to to turn out."
Misattributed