Vladimir Lenin Quotes
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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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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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You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action.
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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.
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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.
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The bourgeoisie is many times stronger than we. To give it the weapon of freedom of the press is to ease the enemy's cause, to help the class enemy. We do not desire to end in suicide, so we will not do this.
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You must act with all energy. Mass searches. Execution for concealing arms.
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But democracy is by no means a limit one may not overstep; it is only one of the stages in the course of development from feudalism to capitalism, and from capitalism to Communism.
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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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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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We are not utopians, we do not “dream” of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and "foremen and accountants".
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Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people.
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Politics is the most concentrated expression of economics.
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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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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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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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But I can't listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid, nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell.
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The reflection of nature in man's thought must be understood not lifelessly but in the eternal process of movement, the arising of contradictions and their solution.
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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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Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.
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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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Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism. Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.
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Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed.