Vladimir Lenin Quotes

236 Sourced Quotes

Let us... take the most concrete example of state capitalism... It is Germany. Here we have the 'last word' in modern, large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organization, subordinated to Junker-bourgeois imperialism. Cross out the words in italics and [substitute] a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, and you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism.

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
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
Attention, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not our task to descend to the level of the 'working masses'.

Vladimir Lenin
We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination, as the immediate task of the coming revolutionary action.

Vladimir Lenin
The natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i. e., he must be a dialectical materialist.

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

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
Russians are too kind, they lack the ability to apply determined methods of revolutionary terror.

Vladimir Lenin
Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation.

Vladimir Lenin
The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of another in the endeavor to keep them disunited. Class-conscious workers, realising that the break-down of all the national barriers by capitalism is inevitable and progressive, are trying to help to enlighten and organise their fellow-workers from the backward countries.

Vladimir Lenin
Notwithstanding all the differences in the aims and tasks of the Russian revolution, compared with the French revolution of 1871, the Russian proletariat had to resort to the same method of struggle as that first used by the Paris Commune — civil war. Mindful of the lessons of the Commune, it knew that the proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-today interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes.

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
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
To become a power the class-conscious workers must win the majority to their side. As long as no violence is used against the people there is no other road to power. We are not Blancists, we do not stand for the seizure of power by a minority.

Vladimir Lenin
The state does not function as we desired. The car does not obey. A man is at the wheel and he seems to lead it, but the car does not drive in the desired direction. It moves as another force wishes.

Vladimir Lenin
It is in prison … that one becomes a real revolutionary.

Vladimir Lenin
We know that an unskilled labourer or a cook cannot immediately get on with the job of state administration.

Vladimir Lenin
The Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers with the aid of the British Noskes and Scheidemanns.

Vladimir Lenin
The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them.

Vladimir Lenin