Vladimir Lenin Quotes
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Sometimes - history needs a push.
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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.
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You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action. A plenary meeting of the Soviet must be called to decide on mass searches in Petrograd and the goods stations. To carry out these searches, each factory and company must form contingents, not on a voluntary basis: it must be the duty of everyone to take part in these searches under the threat of being deprived of his bread card. We can't expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism: speculators must be shot on the spot. Moreover, bandits must be dealt with just as resolutely: they must be shot on the spot.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action.
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Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.
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Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.
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Only by abolishing private property in land and building cheap and hygienic dwellings can the housing problem be solved.
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Politics is the most concentrated expression of economics.
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Materialism is the recognition of "objects in themselves", or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies of images of those objects.
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Capitalists are no more capable of self-sacrifice than a man is capable of lifting himself up by his own bootstraps.
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One cannot live in society and be free from society.
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Of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important.
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Democracy is a form of the state, it represents, on the one hand, the organized, systematic use of force against persons; but, on the other hand, it signifies the formal recognition of equality of citizens, the equal right of all to determine the structure of, and to administer, the state.
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One would like to stroke and caress human beings, but one dares not do so, because they bite.
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Trust is good, but control is better.
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One fool can ask more questions in a minute than 12 wise men can answer in an hour.
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It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it.
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For the first time the peasant has seen real freedom - freedom to eat his bread, freedom from starvation.
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The government is tottering. We must deal it the death blow an any cost. To delay action is the same as death.
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Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.
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All countries will inevitably have to do what Russia has done.