Vladimir Lenin Quotes

236 Sourced Quotes

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners.

Vladimir Lenin
When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward – or go back. He who now talks about the 'freedom of the press' goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.

Vladimir Lenin
If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years.

Vladimir Lenin
The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.

Vladimir Lenin
Down with all colonial policy, down with the whole policy of intervention and capitalist struggle for the conquest of foreign lands and foreign populations, for new privileges, new markets, control of the Straits, etc.!

Vladimir Lenin
For any truth, if overdone (as Dietzgen Senior put it), if exaggerated, or if carried beyond the limits of its applicability, can be reduced to absurdity.

Vladimir Lenin
Those who are opposed to armed uprising … must be ruthlessly kicked out as enemies, traitors and cowards.

Vladimir Lenin
To carry on a war for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie, a war which is a hundred times more difficult, protracted and complex than the most stubborn of ordinary wars between states, and to renounce in advance any change of tack, or any utilisation of a conflict of interests (even if temporary) among one's enemies, or any conciliation or compromise with possible allies (even if they are temporary, unstable, vacillating or conditional allies) — is that not ridiculous in the extreme?

Vladimir Lenin
... the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!

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

Vladimir Lenin
Use both bribery and threats to exterminate every Cossack to a man if they set fire to the oil in Guriev.

Vladimir Lenin
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.

Vladimir Lenin
No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies!

Vladimir Lenin
One cannot live in society and be free from society.

Vladimir Lenin
An end to wars, peace among the nations, the cessation of pillaging and violence — such is our ideal, but only bourgeois sophists can seduce the masses with this ideal, if the latter is divorced from a direct and immediate call for revolutionary action.

Vladimir Lenin
Only the most ignorant people can close their eyes to the bourgeois nature of the democratic revolution which is now taking place. Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense.

Vladimir Lenin
The trial of the insurrectionists from Shuia, for opposing aid to the starving, should be carried out in utmost haste and should end not other than with the shooting of the very largest number of the most influential and dangerous of the Black Hundreds in Shuia, and, if possible, not only in this city but even in Moscow and several other ecclesiastical centers.

Vladimir Lenin
The working class must break up, smash the "ready-made state machinery," and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.

Vladimir Lenin
It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse, and howl than to attempt to relate, to explain.

Vladimir Lenin
Do everything to demonstrate, and in the most emphatic manner, our sympathy for the Moslems, their autonomy, independence, etc.

Vladimir Lenin
He who accepts the class struggle cannot fail to accept civil wars, which in every class society are the natural, and under certain conditions inevitable, continuation, development and intensification of the class struggle… To repudiate civil war, or to forget about it, is to fall into extreme opportunism and renounce the socialist revolution.

Vladimir Lenin
The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.

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

Vladimir Lenin
What we prize most is peace and an opportunity to devote all our efforts to restoring our economy.

Vladimir Lenin
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.

Vladimir Lenin