> Does anyone know if Lenin said:
>
> "We have to be as radical as reality itself."
Almost surely.
> When and where?
I dunno.
I want to make a very brief ad for the swamp-forum news:alt.political.socialism.trotsky on questions like that. Doug considers a.p.s.t. a pestilential sinkhole (and there is much to recommend his view). But IMHO it's the best Usenet newsgroup, maybe even the best place on the Net, to ask this sort of thing. The old FAQ might not be much, but it contains the definitive answer to whether anyone can find any direct quote of Karl Marx saying that he was no Marxist. [*]
> "We have to be as radical as reality itself."
I don't think it appears in any of our Leninist High Scriptures. I think this is one of the things that Lenin said to people, with sufficiently credible documentation to agree that he said it (Valeriu Marcu's Memoirs are one such source), but I'm not aware of any direct citation.
_Please_ let me know if you find one.
- David Stevens
http://home.att.net/~phylstevens/
(Trotsky, Sex, and Drugs)
[*] Ans.: There isn't any direct quote in Karl's
own name, but Engels related this (twice).
It's in section 6.4: http://home.att.net/~phylstevens/apst/trotfaqsec6.html