Top 249 Quotes & Sayings by Vladimir Lenin - Page 3

Be as radical as Reality.

When a liberal is abused, he says, ‘Thank God they didn’t beat me.’ When he is beaten, he thanks God they didn’t kill him. When he is killed, he will thank God that his immortal soul has been delivered from its mortal clay.

It would be the greatest mistake, certainly, to think that concessions mean peace. Nothing of the kind. Concessions are nothing but a new form of war.

All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all.

Russians are too kind, they lack the ability to apply determined methods of revolutionary terror.

All extremes are bad. All that is good and useful, if carried to extremes, may become-and beyond a certain limit is bound to become-bad and injurious.

Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.

The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.

Our aim is to achieve a socialist system of society, which, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by eliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will inevitably eliminate the very possibility of war.

Bourgeois democracy is democracy of pompous phrases, solemn words, exuberant promises and the high-sounding slogans of freedom and equality. But, in fact, it screens the non-freedom and inferiority of women, the non-freedom and inferiority of the toilers and exploited.

All contemporary religions and churches, all and every kind of religious organization, Marxism has always viewed as organs of bourgeois reaction, serving as a defense of exploitation and the doping of the working-classes.

The Jewish bourgeoisie are our enemies, not as Jews but as bourgeoisie. The Jewish worker is our brother.

Face the truth squarely. In politics that is always the best and the only correct attitude.

In the end, one or the other will triumph - a funeral dirge will be sung over the Soviet republic or over world capitalism.

It is not difficult to be a revolutionary when revolution has already broken out and is in spate, when all people are joining the revolution just because they are carried away, because it is the vogue, and sometimes even from careerist motives. It is far more difficult--and far more precious--to be a revolutionary when the conditions for direct, open, really mass and really revolutionary struggle do not yet exist.

The political form of a society wherein the proletariat is victorious in overthrowing the bourgeoisie will be a democratic republic.

The status of women up to now has been compared to that of a slave; women have been tied to the home, and only socialism can save them from this. They will only be completely emancipated when we change from small-scale individual farming to collective farming and collective working of the land.

Autocracy cannot do without its twin agents: a hangman and a priest, the first to suppress popular resistance by force, the second to sweeten and embellish the lot of the oppressed with empty promises of a heavenly kingdom.

Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.

Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.

The constitution of Soviet Russia must insure equal rights for all citizens regardless of sex, creed, race, or nationality.

I must say that the tasks of the youth in general, and of the Young Communist Leagues and all other organisations in particular, might be summed up in a single word: learn.

Attention, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not our task to descend to the level of the 'working masses'.

Perfect definition of atheist dogma. Your mind has been subjected to subtle mental conditioning year after year. Now the atheist lie has become the truth to you. A lie that can be blown away with the real truth. It just takes time to unwind the atheist mental conditioning. The truth is out there. Outside of atheist dogma lies the truth!

False rhetoric and false boastfulness spell moral ruin and lead unfailingly to political extinction.

Sometimes quantity has a quality all its own.

The nearer we come to the full military suppression of the bourgeoisie, the more dangerous becomes to us the high flood of petty-bourgeois Anarchism. And the struggle against these elements cannot be waged with propaganda and agitation alone. ... The struggle must also be waged by applying force and compulsion.

Unity must be won, and only the workers, the class-conscious workers themselves can win it - by stubborn and persistent effort.

We are not utopians, we do not “dream” of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and "foremen and accountants".

War cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished.

It is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.

I come to the categorical conclusion that precisely at this moment we must give battle to the Black Hundred clergy in the most decisive and merciless manner and crush its resistance with such brutality that it will not forget it for decades to come. The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better.

You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain fatally downtrodden because all housework is left to them. In most cases housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman.

Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.

People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.

We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general.

You have read and heard that communist theory-the science of communism created in the main by Marx, this doctrine of Marxism-has ceased to be the work of a single socialist of the nineteenth century, even though he was a genius, and that it has become the doctrine of millions and tens of millions of proletarians all over the world, who are applying it in their struggle against capitalism.

Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capitalism is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.

We shall not achieve socialism without a struggle.

The majority of the so-called great powers have long been exploiting and enslaving a whole series of small and weak peoples. And the imperialist war is nothing other than a war for the division and redivision of this kind of booty.

The reflection of nature in man's thought must be understood not lifelessly but in the eternal process of movement, the arising of contradictions and their solution.

Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.

Bah, tombstones are only good for pigeons to sit on

For the complete extinction of the state, complete Communism is necessary.

Imperialism, in a sense, is the transition stage from capitalism to Socialism. . . . It is capitalism dying, not dead.

Peace, Land, and Bread! All power to the Soviet!

Any army which does not train to use all the weapons, all the means and methods of warfare that the enemy possesses, or may possess, is behaving in an unwise or even criminal manner. This applies to politics even more than it does to the art of war.

Where and when have riots and anarchy been provoked by wise measures? If the government had acted wisely, and if their measures had met the needs of the poor peasants, would there have been unrest among the peasant masses?

Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed.

A party is the vanguard of a class, and its duty is to lead the masses and not merely to reflect the average political level of the masses.

Socialists cannot achieve their great aim without fighting against all oppression of nations.

It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it.

One must not count in thousands, like the propagandist belonging to a small group that has not yet given leadership to the masses; in these circumstances one must count in millions and tens of millions.

For the first time the peasant has seen real freedom - freedom to eat his bread, freedom from starvation.

The leaders of the petty bourgeoisie must teach the people to trust the bourgeoisie. The proletarians must teach the people to distrust the bourgeoisie.

Human reason has discovered many amazing things in nature and will discover still more, and will thereby increase its power over nature.

No revolution is worth anything unless it can defend itself.

A country of inveterate, backwoods, thick-headed, egotistic philistines

Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation.

Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people.