David

“During the years of Stalin's reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that "socialism doesn't work" is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“Uncompromising struggle against class and national enemies they knew well. Close unity with friends and relatives they also knew. But how to struggle and unite spontaneously, how to deepen unity through struggle, how to conquer weakness with criticism, how to exorcise the bad in friends and allies while developing the good - all this had to be learned.”
― William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village

“Everyone knew we were deadly serious revolutionaries, not "revolutionaries" seeking a "peaceful political solution" by diplomatic means and using fighting as a side show to demonstrate that we could cause trouble. The masses were for liberation, not capitulation; they rallied behind their Front as the exponent of people's war and protracted armed struggle.”
― Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live: Autobiography of a Revolutionary as Told to George Hajjar