Bob > Bob's Quotes

“The so-called War on Terror was, in reality, a War using Religion, or the intensity of religious feelings of populations.”
― F. William Engdahl, The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy

“Real intelligence in politics, as in science, is the ability to recognize connections that are not necessarily obvious, to see relationships—seeing the interconnectedness of all life, all peoples, and all wars. Real intelligence is the ability to understand that when you unleash a destructive force in one place, it affects all mankind destructively, including those who unleash it.”
― F. William Engdahl, The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy

“Hippocrates’s theory of the humors, which was perpetuated by Galen. The theory held that the body possessed four fluids, or humors, which corresponded to the four elements from which all material being was composed: earth (black bile), fire (yellow bile), water (phlegm), and air (water). A predominance of one humor affected an individual’s temperament, so a warm, happy, extroverted personality was associated with blood. A choleric, fiery temperament indicated a predominance of yellow bile (khole in Greek), while a melancholic or dark disposition was caused by the predominance of black bile. Finally, a phlegmatic temperament was due to an excess of phlegm. It was believed that an individual in good health enjoyed a balance of the four humors and that illness was an expression of imbalance.”
― Charles River Editors, The Byzantine Empire and the Plague: The History and Legacy of the Pandemic that Ravaged the Byzantines in the Early Middle Ages

“Galen expounded upon Hippocrates’s theory by teaching that excess humors needed expelling from the body, typically via bloodletting, vomiting, sneezing, or urination.”
― Charles River Editors, The Byzantine Empire and the Plague: The History and Legacy of the Pandemic that Ravaged the Byzantines in the Early Middle Ages

“Thus, when blood, which was believed to be stagnant in the body, would swell to excess, physicians would lance or stab boils to release it.”
― Charles River Editors, The Byzantine Empire and the Plague: The History and Legacy of the Pandemic that Ravaged the Byzantines in the Early Middle Ages

“Needless to say, these treatments were not effective, but that didn’t stop the Western world from using techniques like bloodletting for another 1,300 years,”
― Charles River Editors, The Byzantine Empire and the Plague: The History and Legacy of the Pandemic that Ravaged the Byzantines in the Early Middle Ages

“Character and motivation are not static qualities; they undergo growth and change in lives normally marked by crucial junctures and times of future-determining decision. Moreover, the selfhood or (in Erikson’s phrase) “psychosocial identity” formed in youth has a prospective or programmatic dimension. It comprises not simply an individual’s sense of who and what he is, but also his goals—his clear or inchoate beliefs about what he can, should, and will achieve. Hence later biographical vicissitudes cannot but impinge upon personality profoundly. Fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the inner life-scenario necessarily affects the individual’s relationship to himself, and this is something that lies at the core of personality. It is likewise bound to affect his relations with other persons significant to him and thereby, perhaps, his and their lives as a whole.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“The grievances felt by the peasant were many and deep, and he was not always averse to voicing them or even to acting upon them violently. But he typically vented his feelings of protest upon the immediate agents of misfortune—above all the landlord—and exempted the tsar himself from blame. For was not the tsar surrounded by ministers and counselors who deceived him and kept him in ignorance of the people’s sufferings? Such was the peasant’s line of reasoning, and it must have imparted a special poignancy to another of his proverbs: “God is high above, and the tsar is far away.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“It was in this tradition that the priest Georgi Gapon led an icon-bearing procession of workers to the Winter Palace in Petersburg on January 22, 1905, to petition Nicholas for reforms and assistance. The tsar would not receive his loyal subjects, troops fired upon the procession, and the day went down in Russian history as “Bloody Sunday.” The massacre contributed both to the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution and to the decline of credence in the traditional Russian ruler-myth. Its symbolic significance to a tradition-bound Russian mind was expressed in Gapon’s tragic words after the shooting: “There is no tsar anymore.”[6]”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“The great popular insurrections that broke out from time to time in Russian history show that the peasant, even at his most rebellious, tended to preserve a loyalty to the tsar or to the idea of being ruled by a tsar.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“In no case did the leaders proclaim the movements to be in opposition to the tsar. They held, rather, that the tsar was on their side, or that some other member of the royal family was with them, or that they themselves were the tsar.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“When members of the radical intelligentsia went out into the villages in the “going to the people” movement of the eighteen-seventies and preached socialism to the peasantry in an anti-tsarist spirit, the peasants themselves turned very many of them over to the police. The absence of a monarchist theme from the educated young radicals’ socialist propaganda may help to explain the negative peasant response to the movement. Not until the turn of the century did this situation change. By that time the Russian peasant and especially the peasant-turned-worker was finally becoming receptive to revolutionary propaganda of non-monarchist character.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“eighteen-forties and fifties”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Hence the abolitionist-minded intelligentsia, along with liberal elements in Russian society and within the bureaucracy, inclined not toward a constitutionalist program, realization of which would only strengthen the political influence of the landowners, but to the idea of a progressive autocracy.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“hope in a dictatorship of the tsar, acting for the people and against the nobles.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a writer and critic who assumed intellectual leadership of the intelligentsia in the fifties, had in 1848 confided to his diary the thought that Russia needed an autocracy that would champion the interests of the lower classes in order to realize future equality. He added: “Peter the Great acted thus, in my opinion, but such a power must realize that it is temporary, that it is a means, not an end.”[10]”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“the man of the future in Russia was the peasant, the muzhik; and economically backward, not-yet-capitalist Russia, blessed by the survival of its archaic village commune, might in fact be destined to lead the world to socialism.[11] Here in embryo was the socialist ideology of the Russian populist (narodrik) revolutionary movement that developed among the radical intelligentsia in the late fifties and sixties.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“What is remarkable is that Herzen, in the earlier years of Alexander II’s reign (1855–81), combined this “Russian socialism,” as it came to be called, with the theory of progressive autocracy. He called upon Alexander to be a “crowned revolutionary,” and a “tsar of the land,” and to continue Peter the Great’s cause of reform by breaking with the Petersburg period as resolutely as Peter had broken with the Moscow period.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“The vision of a “Jacobin Romanov” effecting a socialist transformation of Russia from the throne in St. Petersburg was wildly utopian, and the radicals would obviously have been disillusioned even if the land arrangements under the reform of 1861 had not proved so unsatisfactory as to provoke serious peasant unrest in the aftermath of emancipation. The latter circumstance, however, spurred the growth of the militant populism of the sixties, which declared war on official Russia and saw in Alexander II, whom Herzen himself had earlier christened the “tsar-liberator,” the greatest enemy of the Russian people.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“and said in effect: “Perish—the sooner the better.” So it was that Serno-Solovevich, for example, became a founder of the revolutionary secret society Zemlia i Volia (Land and Liberty), predecessor of the Narodnaia Volia (People’s Will) organization, whose leaders finally carried out the assassination of Alexander. But the change of mind was most clearly reflected in the proclamation written by a student, Karakozov, to explain his unsuccessful attempt on the tsar’s life in 1866. Russian history, it said, shows that the person really responsible for all the people’s sufferings is the tsar himself: “It is the tsars who through the centuries have gradually built up the organization of the state, and the army; it is they who have handed out the land to the nobles. Think carefully about it, brothers, and you will see that the tsar is the first of the nobles. He never holds out his hand to the peasant because he himself is the people’s worst enemy.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“But we now come to one of those metamorphoses in the history of political thought which show its inner complexity. For in abandoning the notion of a progressive autocracy, the narodniki of the sixties and seventies gave it a new incarnation that preserved an essential part of its content while radically changing its form. From the previous idea of a dictatorship of the tsar acting for the people against the nobles, and transforming Russia from above on socialist principles, some deleted the figure of the tsar—and substituted for it the organization of revolutionaries.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“What supplanted the notion of progressive autocracy, then, was the idea that a revolutionary seizure of power from below should be followed by the formation of a dictatorship of the revolutionary party, which would use political power for the purpose of carrying through from above a socialist transformation of Russian society.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Russian Jacobinism.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“a ruling elite of revolutionary intellectuals who had conquered political power through “destructive” revolutionary activity from below would utilize this power for “constructive” revolutionary activity from above. Relying chiefly on persuasion of the masses through propaganda rather than on coercion, they would gradually transform the country on socialist lines—building the mir into a genuine commune, expropriating private property in the means of production, fostering equality, and encouraging popular self-government to the point where the revolutionary dictatorship would itself no longer be needed.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“The populists of the seventies had been divided over revolutionary tactics, some advocating the gradual conversion of the peasants to their cause through propaganda (as in the “going to the people” movement of that decade) and others arguing for propaganda “by deed,” meaning terrorist action. The latter group saw the Russian peasant as a potential rebel against authority, and reasoned that an act like the assassination of the tsar might spark a general conflagration in the countryside, a greater and successful Pugachev movement. The assassination of Alexander II in 1881, by members of the People’s Will, aroused no such peasant response, however, and led to more severe reaction under his successor, Alexander III. In the sequel many radicals from the populist camp turned away from the tactics of terrorism and lost faith in the peasantry as a revolutionary constituency.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Given all these conditions, it is not surprising that a section of the intelligentsia grew receptive to the ideology of proletarian socialist revolution being propagated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In a number of European countries there existed by this time Social Democratic parties professing Marxism as their program and acting in the name of the industrial working class as their principal constituency.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“Meanwhile, another potential constituency was appearing in the still small but growing Russian industrial worker class, which numbered upwards of three million before the end of the century.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“In 1883 a populist turned Marxist, Georgi Plekhanov, launched Russian Marxism on its career as an organized movement by forming a group for “The Liberation of Labor” in Geneva, Switzerland, where he resided.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“The founding documents were Plekhanov’s anti-populist tract Socialism and the Political Struggle and its continuation, Our Differences. In them he concentrated his attack squarely upon Russian Jacobinism.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929

“In these early writings, as it turned out, Plekhanov was laying the theoretical foundations not of the Russian Marxist political movement as a whole but of its Menshevik wing. The opposing, Bolshevik, wing, of which Lenin became leader, showed the influence of some of the very ideas Plekhanov was attacking. But not until much later did all this become clear.”
― Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929