Vladimir Lenin Quotes

243 Sourced Quotes

If the world is eternally moving and developing matter (as the Marxists think), reflected by the developing human consciousness, what is there static here? The point at issue is not the immutable essence of things, or an immutable consciousness, but the correspondence between the consciousness which reflects nature and the nature which is reflected by consciousness.

Vladimir Lenin
We want to achieve a new and better order of society: in this new and better society there must be neither rich nor poor; all will have to work. Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people. This new and better society is called socialist society. The teachings about this society are called socialism.

Vladimir Lenin
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.

Vladimir Lenin
It is logical to assert that all matter possesses a property which is essentially akin to sensation, the property of reflection.

Vladimir Lenin
The uprising of the five kulak districts should be mercilessly suppressed… Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers... Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts [km] around, the people will see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks.

Vladimir Lenin
Disarmament is the ideal of socialism. There will be no wars in socialist society; consequently, disarmament will be achieved. But whoever expects that socialism will be achieved without a social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a socialist. Dictatorship is state power based directly on violence. And in the twentieth century — as in the age of civilisation generally — violence means neither a fist nor a club, but troops. To put disarmament in the programme is tantamount to making the general declaration: We are opposed to the use of arms. There is as little Marxism in this as there would be if we were to say: We are opposed to violence!

Vladimir Lenin
It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables... 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.

Vladimir Lenin
It is true that liberty is precious — so precious that it must be rationed.

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

Vladimir Lenin
Treat the Jews (express it politely: Jewish petty bourgeoisie) and urban inhabitants in the Ukraine with an iron rod, transferring them to the front, not letting them into the government agencies (except in an insignificant percentage, in particularly exceptional circumstances, under class control).

Vladimir Lenin
No revolution is worth anything unless it can defend itself.

Vladimir Lenin
Act with the greatest determination and on the offensive. The defensive is the death of every armed rising.

Vladimir Lenin
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. I am just like everybody else.

Vladimir Lenin
Communism is Soviet government plus the electrification of the whole country. Otherwise the country will remain a country of small peasant economy, and it is up to us to realize this quite clearly.

Vladimir Lenin
By destroying the peasant economy and driving the peasant from the country to the town, the famine creates a proletariat... Furthermore the famine can and should be a progressive factor not only economically. It will force the peasant to reflect on the bases of the capitalist system, demolish faith in the tsar and tsarism, and consequently in due course make the victory of the revolution easier... Psychologically all this talk about feeding the starving and so on essentially reflects the usual sugary sentimentality of our intelligentsia.

Vladimir Lenin
I don't care what becomes of Russia. To hell with it … All this is only the road to a World Revolution.

Vladimir Lenin
I absolutely do not pretend in the slightest fashion to knowledge of military science.

Vladimir Lenin
Humanity has not yet evolved and we do not as yet know a type of government superior to and better than the Soviets of Workers', Agricultural Labourers', Peasants', and Soldiers' Deputies.

Vladimir Lenin
[Use] rifles, revolvers, bombs, knives, knuckle-dusters, sticks, rags soaked in kerosene for starting fires... barbed wire, nails (against cavalry)… or acids to be poured on the police... The killing of spies, policemen, gendarmes, the blowing up of police stations... [must start] at a moment's notice.

Vladimir Lenin
It is not for nothing that Skaldin in one part of his book quotes Adam Smith: we have seen that both his views and the character of his arguments in many respects repeat the theses of that great ideologist of the progressive bourgeoisie.

Vladimir Lenin
It is obvious that a whiteguard insurrection is being prepared in Nizhni. You must strain every effort, appoint three men will) dictatorial powers (yourself, Markin and one other), organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like.

Vladimir Lenin
So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state.

Vladimir Lenin
The truth about Kolchak (and his double, Denikin) has now been revealed in full. The shooting of tens of thousands of workers. The shooting even of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The flogging of peasants of entire districts. The public flogging of women. The absolutely unbridled power of the officers, the sons of landowners. Endless looting. Such is the truth about Kolchak and Denikin.

Vladimir Lenin
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.

Vladimir Lenin
We have invited and continue to invite the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to share power with us.

Vladimir Lenin