Vladimir Lenin Quotes
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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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Politics is the most concentrated expression of economics.
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The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into smaller states and all-national isolation, not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them.
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Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed.
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Democracy is indispensable to socialism.
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In the last analysis, productivity of labour is the most important, the principal thing for the victory of the new social system.
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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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For any truth, if “overdone” (as Dietzgen Senior put it), if exaggerated, or if carried beyond the limits of its actual applicability, can be reduced to an absurdity, and is even bound to become an absurdity under these conditions.
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It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws.
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Our aim is to achieve a socialist system of society, which, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by eliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will inevitably eliminate the very possibility of war.
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Crime is a product of social excess.
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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 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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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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The soundest strategy in war is to postpone operations until the moral disintegration of the enemy renders the delivery of the mortal blow both possible and easy.
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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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The status of women up to now has been compared to that of a slave; women have been tied to the home, and only socialism can save them from this. They will only be completely emancipated when we change from small-scale individual farming to collective farming and collective working of the land.
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Does not the whole history of socialism, particularly of French socialism, which is so rich in revolutionary striving, show us that when the working people themselves take power in their hands the ruling classes resort to unheard-of crimes and shootings if it is a matter of protecting their money-bags.
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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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Human thought by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths.
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When a war is waged by two opposing groups of robbers for the sake of deciding who shall have a freer hand to oppress more people, then the question of the origin of the war is of no real economic or political significance.
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It is not difficult to be a revolutionary when revolution has already broken out and is in spate, when all people are joining the revolution just because they are carried away, because it is the vogue, and sometimes even from careerist motives. It is far more difficult--and far more precious--to be a revolutionary when the conditions for direct, open, really mass and really revolutionary struggle do not yet exist.
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Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.
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Autocracy cannot do without its twin agents: a hangman and a priest, the first to suppress popular resistance by force, the second to sweeten and embellish the lot of the oppressed with empty promises of a heavenly kingdom.