http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/v/vladimir_lenin.html

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed.

One man with a gun can control 100 without one.

There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience.


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http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE1DA113BF931A15752C0A96F948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

In the Communist world, the underground joke is often the best index of conditions. ''What is Communism?'' asks one that has recently been making the rounds.

''Communism,'' goes the reply, ''is the longest and most painful route from capitalism to capitalism.''

That joke, heard in Moscow, would be immediately understood in Beijing, Budapest or any other Communist-ruled capital where a battered economy, systematic repression and chronic corruption are prompting fundamental and wrenching reappraisal.

The process of reform, personified now by Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, evokes both hope and dismay: hope that at last the millions who have lived through the tyrannies and chronic shortages endemic to Communist states could find some relief; dismay that so much of the terrible sacrifice, struggle and deprivation they have endured for so long must now be acknowledged to have been in vain, that the secular faith that once promised so much now stands revealed to its own adherents as a failure.

I suppose that Venezuela must learn on its own that Communism does not work. It will only take a few decades and a few million deaths in slave labor camps to make the point clear. Venezuela is in free fall. It will reach bottom and then, after decades of failures and disasters, Venezuelan Communism will collapse, to be replaced by Capitalism, as always happens.

David F Mayer