Vladimir Lenin Quotes

236 Sourced Quotes

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
International unity of the workers is more important than the national.

Vladimir Lenin
Trade unions and strikes cannot help in times of crisis when there is no demand for this commodity, they cannot change the conditions which, convert labour-power into a commodity and which doom the masses of working people to dire need and unemployment. To change these conditions, a revolutionary struggle against the whole existing social and political system is necessary; the industrial crisis will convince very many workers of the justice of this statement.

Vladimir Lenin
Human reason has discovered many amazing things in nature and will discover still more, and will thereby increase its power over nature.

Vladimir Lenin
The nearer we come to the full military suppression of the bourgeoisie, the more dangerous becomes to us the high flood of petty-bourgeois Anarchism. And the struggle against these elements cannot be waged with propaganda and agitation alone. … The struggle must also be waged by applying force and compulsion.

Vladimir Lenin
Terrorists bow to the spontaneity of the passionate indignation of intellectuals, who lack the ability or opportunity to connect the revolutionary struggle and the working-class movement into an integral whole. It is difficult indeed for those who have lost their belief, or who have never believed, that this is possible, to find some outlet for their indignation and revolutionary energy other than terror.

Vladimir Lenin
Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up.

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

Vladimir Lenin
The bourgeoisie are today evading taxation by bribery and through their connections; we must close all loopholes.

Vladimir Lenin
It is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.

Vladimir Lenin
Sensation is a subjective image of the objective world.

Vladimir Lenin
What caused the war? The greed of the Italian money bags and capitalists, who need new markets and new achievements for Italian imperialism. What kind of war was it? A perfected, civilised blood bath, the massacre of Arabs with the help of the latest weapons.

Vladimir Lenin
Only by abolishing private property in land and building cheap and hygienic dwellings can the housing problem be solved.

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
To call a fight for the Zionist idea of a Jewish nation, for the federal principle of Party organisation, a fight for the equality of the Jews in the world family of the proletariat is to degrade the struggle from the plane of ideas and principles to that of suspicion, incitement and fanning of historically-evolved prejudices. It glaringly reveals a lack of real ideas and principles as weapons of struggle.

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
And, indeed, there could not be any other grouping among our students, because they are the most responsive section of the intelligentsia, and the intelligentsia are so called just because they most consciously, most resolutely and most accurately reflect and express the development of class interests and political groupings in society as a whole.

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
To hoard surpluses of grain and other food products at a time when the people in Petrograd, in Moscow, and in dozens of non-agricultural uyezds are not only suffering from a shortage of bread, but are cruelly starving, is an enormous crime deserving the most ruthless punishment.

Vladimir Lenin