Aditya Pareek

“Nor would he condemn democracy outright, allowing that it might be appropriate for some countries. Still, he argued that democracy would bring disintegration to Russia, which needed “firm authority.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Lowell’s best friend was the heroically moustached art director of a tobacco magazine that published in the same building where Lowell worked at plumbing. His name was Harry Balmer, and despite the evidence of his moustache he was nervous, compulsive, and wracked with small fears. He looked his best from across a wide room; the closer you got to him, the more he seemed to fall apart into a mass of twitches and gnawed finernails and the clearer it became that this big, smart-looking moustache was a kind of bush he was trying to hide behind.”
― L.J. Davis

“Revolutions are like earthquakes: they are always being predicted, and sometimes they come.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“What we designate modernity was not something natural or automatic. It involved a set of difficult-to-attain attributes—mass production, mass culture, mass politics—that the greatest powers mastered. Those states, in turn, forced other countries to attain modernity as well, or suffer the consequences, including defeat in war and possible colonial conquest.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928