Top 148 Lenin Quotes & Sayings

National self-sufficiency or "autarchy" is the ideal of [Adolf] Hitler, not of [Karl] Marx and [Vladimir] Lenin.

My father was convinced, I think rightly, that if he stayed in Russia, he would have trouble with Lenin.

How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin], your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.

If you have a disease of the old society, take a dose of Lenin as medication.

Others loved themselves, money, theories, power: Lenin loved his fellow men.... Lenin was God, as Christ was God, because God is Love and Christ and Lenin were all Love!

Lenin, the greatest theorist of them all, did not know what he was going to do after he had got the power.

The principle of collective leadership is elementary for a proletarian party and for a party of the Lenin type. Nevertheless, we must emphasize this old truth, because for about 20 years we have had practically no collective leadership; there flourished the cult of the individual which was condemned first by Marx and then by Lenin. And this, of course, could not but reflect negatively on the position of the party and its work.

The hollowing out of the heartland was good for Walmart's bottom line: its slogan might have been an amoral maxim attributed to Lenin - 'The worse, the better.'

Why is Earth Day, today, also Lenin's birthday? Coincidence? Or does it signal the true intent of the national and worldwide environmental movement?

I don't know that Donald Trump is anything more to Putin than what Lenin called a poleznye durak, a useful idiot.

A socialist is someone who has read Lenin and Marx. An anti-socialist is someone who understands Lenin and Marx.

We decided it here. Ilyich [Lenin] believed that we shouldn't leave the Whites a live banner to rally around, especially under the present difficult circumstances.

We are indebted to Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin for giving us a weapon. The weapon is not a machine-gun, but Marxism-Leninism.

[Joseph] Stalin closes the exposition of these [Leon Trotsky] ideas with the words, "Such are in general the characteristic features of [Vladimir] Lenin's conception of the proletarian revolution."

It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution - real girl's talk.

Utterly absorbing.... If you did not have the opportunity to witness the Soviet empire in its death throes, Lenin's Tomb will take you there.

I think I must be the only British actor who's played both Stalin and Trotsky. I need to play Lenin so I can make it a triptych.

When I see hipsters wearing Mao hats or Lenin T-shirts, I'm grateful. It's like truth-in-labeling. For now I know you are: Woefully ignorant, morally stunted, purposively asinine, or all three.

There would be no Lenin without Rasputin.

I'm the most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne. And they're all dead.

Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency. . . Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose.

Regarding themselves as irreplaceable, both Lenin and Stalin tried in different ways to destroy their successors - Lenin through a testament that attacked Stalin and Trotsky, Stalin through purges culminating in the Doctors' Plot of 1953.

Evolution was Vladimir Ilich Lenin's problem. Lenin lead the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and took over Russia. He killed the Zar [ sic ] and his family in cold blood. There would not be communism in Russia today if had not been for Charles Darwin's book on evolution.

Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none.

Lenin sensed that Tukhachevsky was a kindred spirit. He delegated the most responsible jobs to the obscure lieutenant.

I'm a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal, too.

I suspect in Lenin's works there's everything, if you search well.

Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.

The Soviet Union was pretty much what Lenin and Trotsky said it was.

The statues of Lenin and Stalin are down, but the fight against their ghosts seems harder.

If kids can forget their own mothers but still have a sense of comrade Lenin, then Soviet power really is here to stay!

Lenin's ideal was to build a nation's production effort according to the model of the post office.

I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me.

[Lenin] might have become a Maoist in the sense of attacking the party and bombarding the party headquarters out of necessity to change the whole thing around.

Lenin had taken part in Jewish student meetings in Switzerland thirty-five years before.

In effect, according to Lenin, socialism and democracy are indivisible. By gaining democratic freedoms the working masses come to power.

In their day, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin represented the aspirations and demands of the exploited working masses, and the cause of socialism was inseparably linked with their names.

On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin's remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.

I'm getting a little tired of politicians trying to prove how 'moderate' and 'centrist' they are by taking more of my money and freedom. Where's this center - somewhere between Lenin and Stalin?

Lenin in 1921 observed very presciently that motion pictures were the most powerful tool ever invented to shape the way we thought. He was right. Political films can be successful.

Lenin, Stalin, and Mao slaughtered even more tens of millions in the name of equality than Hitler murdered in the name of inequality.

[Vladimir] Lenin died in January, 1924; three months later [Joseph] Stalin expounded in writing Lenin's conception of the proletarian revolution.

Can and must! The proclamation of this new conception of [Joseph Stalin] is closed by the same words, "Such are in general the characteristic features of Lenin's conception of the proletarian revolution." In the course of a single year Stalin ascribed to [Vladimir] Lenin two directly opposed conceptions of the fundamental question of socialism. The first version represents the real tradition of the party; the second took shape in Stalin's mind only after the death of Lenin, in the course of the struggle against "Trotskyism".

Marx and Lenin were ahead of their time. Marx wrote before offshoring of jobs and the financialization of the economy. Lenin presided over a communist revolution that jumped the gun by taking place in a country in which feudal elements still predominated over capitalism.

I believe, as Lenin said, that this revolutionary chaos may yet crystallize into new forms of life.

The shameless criminality of Lenin, Stalin, and the Cheka cast a long shadow, but I don't see their kind returning anytime soon.

There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.

Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.

Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible.

It is surely indisputable that no single leader in the twentieth century exerted as great an influence on the course of world history as Lenin.

Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism!

Lenin, the greatest man of action in our century and at the same time the most selfless.

Lenin said that people vote with their feet. Well, that's what's happening. They either go, or they don't go. It's all politics. It's all demographics.

Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.

The theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin is universally applicable. We should regard it not as a dogma, but as a guide to action. Studying it is not merely a matter of learning terms and phrases but of learning Marxism-Leninism as the science of revolution. It is not just a matter of understanding the general laws derived by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin from their extensive study of real life and revolutionary experience, but of studying their standpoint and method in examining and solving problems.

Trotsky was essentially a Western mind. Lenin was a Russian, and unlike most other revolutionary exiles, wherever he went he was a Russian.

Their souls were contagious. ... Bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires: that was what Lenin called them.

Lenin in a top hat and frock coat would be a far greater anomaly than the Grand Lama of Thibet or a Zulu chief in that costume.