Vladimir Lenin Quotes

243 Sourced Quotes

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

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
The status of women up to now has been compared to that of a slave; women have been tied to the home, and only socialism can save them from this. They will only be completely emancipated when we change from small-scale individual farming to collective farming and collective working of the land.

Vladimir Lenin
Man's consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.

Vladimir Lenin
The democratisation of the ownership of shares, from which the bourgeois sophists and opportunist so-called Social-Democrats expect (or say that they expect) the democratisation of capital, the strengthening of the role and significance of small scale production, etc., is, in fact, one of the ways of increasing the power of the financial oligarchy.

Vladimir Lenin
All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake public opinion for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.

Vladimir Lenin
A full 'definition of an object must include the whole of human experience, both as a criterion of truth and a practical indicator of its connection with human wants.

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

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
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