Lenin

"Your skills – and improving them – are not the point. Far more important is what you try to do – the originality and reach of your mission, goal, destiny, whatever you call it, and your tenacity, nay, fanaticism, and luck in seeing it through to completion. •  Your objective must be new, revolutionary, imaginative and almost laughably ambitious. •  It must also be incarnated within your personality – it must come from the soul. •  Ultimately, the ‘what’ – in Lenin’s stirring phrase, ‘What is to be done?’ – is more vital than the ‘how’. This landmark is the what. The other eight landmarks are the how."

"Lenin’s great intuition was that precisely because Russia was a backward country ruled by a tiny elite – the tsars and their hangers-on – power could pass to another tiny minority, his revolutionary group, if they were ruthless and disciplined."