Vladimir Lenin Quotes

243 Sourced Quotes

The practical activity of man had to lead his consciousness to the reptetition of various logical figures thousands of millions of times in order that these figures could obtain the significance of axioms.

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
For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary.

Vladimir Lenin
The capture of Simbirsk, my home town, is a wonderful tonic, the best treatment for my wounds. I feel a new lease of life and energy.

Vladimir Lenin
Socialism, by organising production without class oppression, by ensuring the well-being of all members of the state, gives full play to the sympathies of the population, thereby promoting and greatly accelerating the drawing together and fusion of the nations.

Vladimir Lenin
Socialists cannot achieve their great aim without fighting against all oppression of nations.

Vladimir Lenin
Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.

Vladimir Lenin
To be successful, insurrection must rely not upon conspiracy and not upon a party, but upon the advanced class. That is the first point. Insurrection must rely upon a revolutionary upsurge of the people. That is the second point. Insurrection must rely upon that turning-point in the history of the growing revolution when the activity of the advanced ranks of the people is at its height, and when the vacillations in the ranks of the enemy and in the ranks of the weak, half-hearted and irresolute friends of the revolution are strongest. That is the third point. And these three conditions for raising the question of insurrection distinguish Marxism from Blanquism.

Vladimir Lenin
The civil war which was started by the Cadet-Kaledin counter-revolutionary revolt against the Soviet authorities, against the workers' and peasants' government, has finally brought the class struggle to a head and has destroyed every chance of setting in a formally democratic way the very acute problems with which history has confronted the peoples of Russia, and in the first place her working class and peasants.

Vladimir Lenin
The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently; they are more original, more peculiar, more varied than anyone could have expected.

Vladimir Lenin
Unity must be won, and only the workers, the class-conscious workers themselves can win it - by stubborn and persistent effort.

Vladimir Lenin
Our aim is to achieve a socialist system of society, which, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by eliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will inevitably eliminate the very possibility of war.

Vladimir Lenin
Politics begin where the masses are, not where there are thousands, but where there are millions, that is where serious politics begin.

Vladimir Lenin
Tsar Nicholas the Bloody, who has dispersed the First and Second Dumas, who has drowned Russia in blood, enslaved Poland and Finland, and is in alliance with out — and-out reactionaries conducting a policy of stifling the Jews and all aliens, the tsar whose loyal friends shot down the workers on the Lena and ruined the peasants to the point of starvation all over Russia — that tsar pretends to be the champion of Slav independence and freedom!

Vladimir Lenin
Human thought by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths.

Vladimir Lenin
In the two months following the revolution the industrialists have robbed the whole of Russia.

Vladimir Lenin
To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament — this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary- constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.

Vladimir Lenin
"The revolution's decisive victory over tsarism" means the establishment of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.

Vladimir Lenin
Peaceful surrender of power by the bourgeoisie is possible, if it is convinced that resistance is hopeless and if it prefers to save its skin. It is much more likely, of course, that even in small states socialism will not be achieved without civil war, and for that reason the only programme of international Social-Democracy must be recognition of civil war, though violence is, of course, alien to our ideals.

Vladimir Lenin
Communists have become bureaucrats. If anything will destroy us, it is this.

Vladimir Lenin
Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.

Vladimir Lenin
But democracy is by no means a limit one may not overstep; it is only one of the stages in the course of development from feudalism to capitalism, and from capitalism to Communism.

Vladimir Lenin
The government is tottering. We must deal it the death blow an any cost. To delay action is the same as death.

Vladimir Lenin
Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the landowners and that of the capitalists. It is a slave society, since the free workers, who all their life work for the capitalists, are entitled only to such means of subsistence as are essential for the maintenance of slaves who produce profit, for the safeguarding and perpetuation of capitalist slavery.

Vladimir Lenin
Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.

Vladimir Lenin