Vladimir Lenin Quotes
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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 stupid to tolerate Nikola; all Chekists have to be on alert to shoot anyone who doesn't turn up to work because of Nikola.
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Of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important.
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No Bolshevik, no Communist, no intelligent socialist has ever entertained the idea of violence against the middle peasants. All socialists have always spoken of agreement with them and of their gradual and voluntary transition to socialism.
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The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.
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We shall not achieve socialism without a struggle.
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Soviet power is a new type of state in which there is no bureacracy, no police, no standing army.
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The majority of the so-called great powers have long been exploiting and enslaving a whole series of small and weak peoples. And the imperialist war is nothing other than a war for the division and redivision of this kind of booty.
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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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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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Trust is good, but control is better.
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But suppose, for the sake of argument, free competition, without any sort of monopoly, would develop capitalism trade more rapidly. Is it not a fact that the more rapidly trade and capitalism develop, the greater is the concentration of production and capital which gives rise to monopoly?
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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.
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No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies!
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One man with a gun can control 100 without one.
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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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Democracy is indispensable to socialism.
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Face the truth squarely. In politics that is always the best and the only correct attitude.
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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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All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery.
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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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We must not depict socialism as if socialists will bring it to us on a plate all nicely dressed. That will never happen. Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence. When violence is exercised by the working people, by the mass of exploited against the exploiters -- then we are for it!
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Every cook has to learn how to govern the state.
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Freedom of speech and the press must be complete. But then freedom of association must be complete too.