Vladimir Lenin Quotes

243 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
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
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
All countries will inevitably have to do what Russia has done.

Vladimir Lenin
It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse, and howl than to attempt to relate, to explain.

Vladimir Lenin
But every little difference may become a big one if it is insisted on.

Vladimir Lenin
It is at moments of need that one learns who one's friends are. Defeated armies learn their lesson.

Vladimir Lenin
Soviet power is a new type of state in which there is no bureacracy, no police, no standing army.

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

Vladimir Lenin
Every question "runs in a vicious circle" because political life as a whole is an endless chain consisting of an infinite number of links. The whole art of politics lies in finding and taking as firm a grip as we can of the link that is least likely to be struck from our hands, the one that is most important at the given moment, the one that most of all guarantees its possessor the possession of the whole chain.

Vladimir Lenin
We Social-Democrats always stand for democracy, not "in the name of capitalism," but in the name of clearing the path for our movement, which clearing is impossible without the development of capitalism.

Vladimir Lenin
Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed.

Vladimir Lenin
We must follow the rule: Better fewer, but better. We must follow the rule: Better get good human material in two or even three years than work in haste without hope of getting any at all.

Vladimir Lenin
Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations -- all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.

Vladimir Lenin
A political leader who desires to be useful to the revolutionary proletariat must be able to distinguish concrete cases of compromises that are inexcusable and are an expression of opportunism and treachery.

Vladimir Lenin
Any army which does not train to use all the weapons, all the means and methods of warfare that the enemy possesses, or may possess, is behaving in an unwise or even criminal manner. This applies to politics even more than it does to the art of war.

Vladimir Lenin
I must say that the tasks of the youth in general, and of the Young Communist Leagues and all other organisations in particular, might be summed up in a single word: learn.

Vladimir Lenin
The whole struggle of our Party (and of the working class movement in Europe generally) must be directed against opportunism. The latter is not a current of opinion, not a tendency; it (opportunism) has now become the organised tool of the bourgeoisie within the working class movement.

Vladimir Lenin
A country of inveterate, backwoods, thick-headed, egotistic philistines

Vladimir Lenin
The majority of the so-called great powers have long been exploiting and enslaving a whole series of small and weak peoples. And the imperialist war is nothing other than a war for the division and redivision of this kind of booty.

Vladimir Lenin
It is not difficult to be a revolutionary when revolution has already broken out and is in spate, when all people are joining the revolution just because they are carried away, because it is the vogue, and sometimes even from careerist motives. It is far more difficult--and far more precious--to be a revolutionary when the conditions for direct, open, really mass and really revolutionary struggle do not yet exist.

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
Our Program is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world outlook. An explanation of our Program, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog.

Vladimir Lenin
Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism; the publication of the appropriate scientific literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party work.

Vladimir Lenin
Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.

Vladimir Lenin
We shall always preach the scientific world outlook and it is essential for us to combat the inconsistency of various "Christians". But that does not mean in the least that the religious question ought to be advance to first place, where is does not belong at all.

Vladimir Lenin
It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods.

Vladimir Lenin