Engels pre-dates Stalin by a considerable period of time and we can assume Stalin has read Engels. Safe to say its Stalin just paraphrasing Engels.

Not safe to say at all, no. It is such an obvious thing to say, and such an easy observation, many people have said something of this nature for a very long time independent of each other. The is basically another phrasing of the question: “how many grains of sand makes a pile?”

I’m not impressed by a cheap observation like this, even when phrased in a clever sounding way. I am impressed when people make new observations when this applies, such as when they are able to model a specific macro system that behaves very differently when the number of inputs is increased by a lot, and show how that is useful for our understanding of nature (including human nature).

Hmm, maybe you could write to Engels to tell him just how unimpressed you are?

I suspect that Stalin read that from Engels. I think that is a reasonable suspicion.

And, further, Engels is just paraphrasing Hegel.

Kant etc.

As I understand it, Stalin said, "Quantity is its own kind of quality." But I don't have the original Russian (someone here no doubt does) where he was referring to the USSR's ability to produce arms faster than their opponents even though the quality was lower.

This is a quote by Thomas A. Callaghan Jr, but is often mis-atrributed to Stalin.

https://klangable.com/blog/quantity-has-a-quality-all-its-ow...

in this[1] work titled “On Dialectic and Historic Materialism”, Stalin references the idea and properly attributes it to Engels.

1 https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/stalin/t14/t14_55.htm

And people ask why I still come to this site :-). That is a great link.

Certainly that dialectic principle is broadly known. But it's specifically (mis)attributed to Stalin with the reference to wartime production/conscription and you won't find that in his works, recorded speeches or memoirs of contemporaries.

This goes in fact for most of his grand quotes. Whatever deep sounding passage are attributed to him and can't be traced back to Marxism tenets, are typically adaptations from the Bible, reflecting his education as a priest.

I misread Engels as Hegel. Of course it makes more sense now.