Vladimir Lenin Quotes
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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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Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.
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You must act with all energy. Mass searches. Execution for concealing arms.
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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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You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action.
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Trust is good, but control is better.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Politics is the most concentrated expression of economics.
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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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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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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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Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.
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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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It is necessary to be able to withstand all this, to agree to any and every sacrifice, and even - if need be - to resort to all sorts of stratagems, manoeuvres and illegal methods, to evasion and subterfuges in order to penetrate the trade unions, to remain in them, and to carry on Communist work in them at all costs.
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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.