Mark Phillips: The American Question

OK, now, I know that hauling out quotations is stupid, especially from the Sacred Pens. But, I bumped into this paragraph of Lenin's today while looking for something else, and it made me laugh. So here you go:

I have lately been glancing through Sukhanov's notes on the revolution. What strikes one most is the pedantry of all our petty-bourgeois democrats and of all the heroes of the Second International. Apart from the fact that they are all extremely faint-hearted, that when it comes to the minutest deviation from the German model even the best of them fortify themselves with reservations -- apart from this characteristic, which is common to all petty-bourgeois democrats and has been abundantly manifested by them throughout the revolution, what strikes one is their slavish imitation of the past. -- "Our Revolution", Collected Works 33, p. 476.

Anyway. Couldn't resist.