Is this Stalin qoute real?

I just saw an ad for a t-shirt that says "The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."-Josef Stalin. If this is true, how come the Right figured it out before the Left?

but lots of other quotes are as well.

and as for the "right" figuring this out before the "left"....Stalin
was on the "left" of the political spectrum...

but B$$$co is Right Wing and Diebold is their tool to do this.

not a Fascist (or the right wing of the spectrum).

edited to add: was beat to this correction!

Here is a great web site for quotes.

http://www.quotedb.com/

He's one of our super-bad-guys, as Hitler is to the Right.

So...

BBV and all that.

and moved him to the Left. Which is crazy and disingenuous on so many levels I am reminded of "1984".

For fuck's sake, does that mean Mussolini was also a Commie (you know, these drone-head Brownshirt are SO FUBAR I'd bet they'd say "yes")?

(he left us the convenient record of stating personally many times that he was Right-Wing Fascisti...but maybe Stalin put him up to it. eh?)

"...by not letting selective people vote, we can decide who wins." To which Jeb Bush replied, "You go girl!"

he said it but right now I can't remember, maybe Lenin or even Marx.

...watch out that you don't gag. He may be identified as being from the left, but I do not consider Stalin as part of my left. :think:


Quotations by Joseph Stalin

A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron.

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

Death solves all problems - no man, no problem.

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.

Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach.

Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.

Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.

History shows that there are no invincible armies.

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.

If any foreign minister begins to defend to the death a "peace conference," you can be sure his government has already placed its orders for new battleships and airplanes.

If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves.

In the Soviet army it takes more courage to retreat than advance.

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division ;and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.

Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.

The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do.

The Pope? How many divisions has he got?

The writer is the engineer of the human soul.

When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use.

I can't deny that's a good one, at least in the point he's making.

I also like this one: "Everyone has the right to be stupid, but some people abuse the privilege."

He was an evil man, but don't say he wasn't intelligent.

"If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves." ~Stalin

I don't know, sounds familiar.

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa121800a.htm

It bears noting that more than one version of the remark exists. This more formal variant appears at least as often as the one you cited: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything."

Neither shows up in the standard quotation dictionaries. About's experts in 20th Century History and Russian Culture both told me they're unaware of authenticating sources for the remark. Ray Gallagher, About's Guide to Quotations, searched the Stalin Internet Library and found nothing resembling it among the Soviet leader's published writings, though he did note that it could have been excerpted from a speech or a private conversation.

I also explored the possibility that Stalin has been wrongly credited with someone else's witticism, but the closest matches I could find by other public figures weren't close enough. Besides the remark you mentioned, usually attributed to "Boss" Tweed of New York, there is this line from Tom Stoppard's philosophical play, Jumpers, produced in 1972: "It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting." A similar thought, perhaps, but notably different wording.

David Allen
Publisher, CEO, Janitor
Plan Nine Publishing
http://www.plan9.org

This is what I was wanting to know. Appreciate the research.

that without violence it is not possible to rule (not a direct quote but thats the gist of it)

In the final analysis, labels of Right and Left are meaningless when you examine the outer reaches of politics. Stalin...Hitler... both totalitarian scum. One sought absolute power through direct state ownership of the means of production, the other sought absolute power through an alliance of the state with the corporate/industrial owners of the means of production. Basically, same desires, same evil, slightly different M.O. If you picture the political spectrum, not as a straight line running from Left to Right, but as an incomplete ring with extremists of Right and Left on the broken side and moderates on the other, it may be easier to see how very close these two "opposites" really are.