Vladimir Lenin Quotes

236 Sourced Quotes

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
The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into smaller states and all-national isolation, not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them.

Vladimir Lenin
No Bolshevik, no Communist, no intelligent socialist has ever entertained the idea of violence against the middle peasants. All socialists have always spoken of agreement with them and of their gradual and voluntary transition to socialism.

Vladimir Lenin
Those who are really convinced that they have made progress in science would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for the old.

Vladimir Lenin
A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution.

Vladimir Lenin
Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence... The class struggle did not accidentally assume its latest form, the form in which the exploited class takes all the means of power in its own hands in order to completely destroy its class enemy, the bourgeoisie...

Vladimir Lenin
Honesty in politics is the result of strength; hypocrisy is the result of weakness.

Vladimir Lenin
War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals... 'He who does not work, neither shall he eat' – this is the practical commandment of socialism... [Our] common aim [is] to clean the land of Russia of all vermin, of fleas – the rogues, of bugs – the rich, and so on and so forth.

Vladimir Lenin
Don't be afraid to admit defeat. Learn from defeat. Do over again more thoroughly, more carefully, and more systematically what you have done badly.

Vladimir Lenin
The Poor Peasants' Committees are necessary to fight the kulaks, the rich, the exploiters, who shackle the working peasants. But between the kulaks, who are a small minority, and the poor or semi-proletarians there is the section of the middle peasants. The Soviet government has never declared or conducted any struggle against them. Any steps or measures to the contrary must be condemned most vigorously and stopped. The socialist government must pursue a policy of agreement with the middle peasants.

Vladimir Lenin
Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions. But every voluntary association (including the party) is also free to expel members who use the name of the party to advocate anti-party views.

Vladimir Lenin
America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism.

Vladimir Lenin
No, Democracy is not identical with majority rule. Democracy is a State which recognizes the subjection of the minority to the majority, that is, an organization for the systematic use of force by one class against the other, by one part of the population against another.

Vladimir Lenin
The suppression of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution.

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

Vladimir Lenin
To accept anything on trust, to preclude critical application and development, is a grievous sin; and in order to apply and develop, simple interpretation is obviously not enough.

Vladimir Lenin