Bob

“The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator. When one speaks to the other then it is not to pass the time of day with et-tu-Brutes. What passes is a truth so terrible that history—at best a conspiracy, not always among gentlemen, to defraud—will never admit it. The truth will be repressed or in ages of particular elegance be disguised as something else.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“Lenin, albeit tardily, realized that Stalin’s personality very much mattered.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Lenin, as we have seen, became alarmed about Stalin’s rudeness; his administrative peremptoriness; his Great Russian nationalism; his tendency to give animosity free rein in official conduct; and his lack of tolerance, loyalty, and considerateness toward others. It was a weighty catalogue of politically significant character defects, but not a reasoned analysis. The others, too, even as their horror of Stalin deepened, stood somehow mentally paralyzed before the enigma of the man’s personality.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“suspect that highly sensitive exclusives have in the past and are now being carefully drip-fed to selected, compromised outlets by Blairite / Brownite / Cameronite / Mayite / Johnsonite governments and are timed for the greatest advantage within the managed control of information. With all this mutual back scratching, no journalist exists with the ability or courage needed to blow the whistle – Assange-like – on such a sordid situation.”
― Paul Cardin, Return to Bomb Alley 1982: The Falklands Deception