9 Quotes by Victor Sebestyen

Poppe, once a leading figure at a scientific research institute, found a job as a swimming pool attendant

In England and France, they executed their kings some centuries ago, but we were late with ours.

Janet Flanner made an interesting observation midway through the year [1947]: in Paris, stores frequented by women, the biggest selling goods were, unsurprisingly, ... But the second item they were ordering was prams, a biological vote of confidence in the future.

If one cannot work for the Party any longer one must be able to look the truth in the face and die...

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, and given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the living.’ Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852.

Within two years of Lenin’s edict more than thirty bishops and 1,200 priests had been killed and thousands more jailed.

The revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has no personal interests, no private affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property and no name. Everything in him is subordinated towards a single thought, a single passion: the Revolution.’ Sergei Nechayev, The Revolutionary Catechism, 1869.

There are plenty of Marxist-Leninist textbooks about taking power; but there are none about giving it up.

Up to the abdication of the last Tsar one of the principal articles in the Fundamental Laws stated, simply, ‘His Majesty is an absolute monarch who is not obliged to answer for his actions to anyone in the world but has the power and the authority to govern his states and lands as a Christian sovereign, in accord with his desire and goodwill.