Vladimir Lenin Quotes

243 Sourced Quotes

Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.

Vladimir Lenin
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.

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 proletarian revolution is impossible without the sympathy and support of the overwhelming majority of the working people.

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

Vladimir Lenin
We have the following of the majority of a class, the vanguard of the revolution, the vanguard of the people, which is capable of carrying the masses with it.

Vladimir Lenin
One of the basic conditions for the victory of socialism is the arming of the workers Communist and the disarming of the bourgeoisie the middle class.

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

Vladimir Lenin
You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

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
No revolution is worth anything unless it can defend itself.

Vladimir Lenin
The war is relentless: it puts the alternative in a ruthless relief: either to perish, or to catch up with the advanced countries and outdistance them, too, in economic matters.

Vladimir Lenin
What the Soviet Constitution gives us no other state has been able to give in two hundred years.

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

Vladimir Lenin
The sole "property" of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside the mind.

Vladimir Lenin
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 love our language and our country, and we are doing our very utmost to raise her toiling masses (i. e., nine-tenths of her population) to the level of a democratic and socialist consciousness.

Vladimir Lenin
Let the "socialist" snivellers croak, let the bourgeoisie rage and fume, but only people who shut their eyes so as not to see, and stuff their ears so as not to hear, can fail to notice that all over the world the birth pangs of the old, capitalist society, which is pregnant with socialism, have begun.

Vladimir Lenin
Behind the epistemological scholasticism of empirio-criticism one must not fail to see the struggle of parties in philosophy, a struggle which in the last analysis reflects the tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society.

Vladimir Lenin
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.

Vladimir Lenin
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.

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

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

Vladimir Lenin
If democracy, in essence, means the abolition of class domination, then why should not a socialist minister charm the whole bourgeois world by orations on class collaboration?

Vladimir Lenin
This fear of criticism displayed by the advocates of freedom of criticism cannot be attributed solely to craftiness. No, the majority of the Economists look with sincere resentment upon all theoretical controversies, factional disagreements, broad political questions, plans for organising revolutionaries, etc.

Vladimir Lenin
The Bolsheviks could not have retained power for two and a half months, let alone two and a half years, without the most rigorous and truly iron discipline in our Party.

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

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