“cuius regio, eius religio”

(1) Garry Kasparov: Hey, Bernie, Don’t Lecture Me About Socialism. I Lived Through It. (The Daily Beast)

“A society that relies too heavily on redistributing wealth eventually runs out of wealth to redistribute. The historical record is clear. It’s capitalism that brought billions of people out of poverty in the 20th century. It’s socialism that enslaved them and impoverished them.”

A quote from 1946 by Victor Sebestyen:

“It is from Stalin that Rákosi took his famous line that the communists used ‘salami tactics, we took what we wanted slice by slice.’ Later Rákosi was brutally frank, or rather, boastful, about how the communists took over in a slow-motion putsch. Speaking to Communist Party workers he explained: ‘Our demands were always modest at first — and were then increased. For instance, first we demanded only “government control” of the banks; only later did we call for outright nationalization of the largest three banks. It was precision methods…that enabled us to defeat the reactionaries.”