History as a way of learning can offer examples of how other men faced up to the difficulties and opportunities of their eras. Even if the circumstances are noticeably different, it is illuminating, and productive of humility as well, to watch other men make their decisions, and to consider the consequences of their values and methods.

William Appleman Williams

Marxism is distinguished from the old utopian socialism by the fact that the latter wanted to build a new society not out of the masses of human material created by bloody, dirty, money-grubbing, rapacious capitalism, but out of especially virtuous people raised in special greenhouses and hothouses.

V. I. Lenin