Vladimir Lenin Quotes (336 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Works

"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder

Vladimir Lenin

The Development of Capitalism in Russia

Vladimir Lenin

What Is to Be Done?

Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Lenin: 336 quotes 145 likes

Famous Vladimir Lenin Quotes

“Capitalists can buy themselves out of any crisis, so long as they make the workers pay”

Vladimir Lenin

“Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

Source: The State and Revolution (1917), Ch. 5.

“One man with a gun can control 100 without one.”

Vladimir Lenin

Not found in Lenin's Collected Works. Began to surface on the internet in the mid-1990s.
Misattributed
Variant: One man with a gun can control a hundred without one.

“When a liberal is abused, he says, ‘Thank God they didn’t beat me.’ When he is beaten, he thanks God they didn’t kill him. When he is killed, he will thank God that his immortal soul has been delivered from its mortal clay.”

Vladimir Lenin

“The task of a truly revolutionary party is not to declare that it is impossible to renounce all compromises, but to be able, through all compromises, when they are unavoidable, to remain true to its principles, to its class, to its revolutionary purpose, to its task of paving the way for revolution and educating the mass of the people for victory in the revolution.”

Vladimir Lenin

“In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favorable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slaveowners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that “they cannot be bothered with democracy,” “cannot be bothered with politics”; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life. The”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: The State and Revolution (1917), Ch. 5
Context: Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the "petty" – supposedly petty – details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for "paupers"!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc., – we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.

Vladimir Lenin Quotes about people

“America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 28, p. 62–75.
Collected Works
Source: A Letter to American Workingmen: From the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia

“Take a factory, a railway, a ship on the high seas, said Engels: is it not clear that not one of these complex technical establishments, based on the use of machinery and the systematic co-operation of many people, could function without a certain amount of subordination and, consequently, without a certain amount of authority or power?”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: State and Revolution

“I am bound to accord you, in the name of free speech, the full right to shout, lie and write to your heart’s content. But you are bound to grant me, in the name of freedom of association, the right to enter into, or withdraw from, association with people advocating this or that view.”

Vladimir Lenin

.
1900s
Context: Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions. But every voluntary association (including the party) is also free to expel members who use the name of the party to advocate anti-party views. Freedom of speech and the press must be complete. But then freedom of association must be complete too. I am bound to accord you, in the name of free speech, the full right to shout, lie and write to your heart’s content. But you are bound to grant me, in the name of freedom of association, the right to enter into, or withdraw from, association with people advocating this or that view. The party is a voluntary association, which would inevitably break up, first ideologically and then physically, if it did not cleanse itself of people advocating anti-party views.

“Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost.”

Vladimir Lenin

“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.”

Vladimir Lenin

From a personal conversation, quoted from memory by Maxim Gorky in "V.I. Lenin" (1924) http://www.marxists.org/archive/gorky-maxim/1924/01/x01.htm 
Attributions
Context: I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day. What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps with a childish naiveté, to think that people can work such miracles! … But I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things, and pat the little heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. These days, one can’t pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. Hence, you have to beat people's little heads, beat mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hm — what a devillishly difficult job!

“In Italy, comrades, in Italy there was but a Socialist able enough to lead the people through a revolutionary path, Benito Mussolini.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Revolutionary Fascism, Erik Norling, Lisbon, Finis Mundi Press (2011) p. 28. Lenin express this to Nicola Bombacci during a reception in the Kremlin.
1920s

Vladimir Lenin: Trending quotes

“What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy. [Addressing to a delegation of Italian socialists in Moscow after Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922]”

Vladimir Lenin

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”

Vladimir Lenin

Truth , Lie

“Without Revolutionary theory, there can be no Revolutionary Movement.”

Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Lenin Quotes

“When the workers of a single factory or of a single branch of industry engage in struggle against their employer or employers, is this class struggle? No, this is only a weak embryo of it. The struggle of the workers becomes a class struggle only when all the foremost representatives of the entire working class of the whole country are conscious of themselves as a single working class and launch a struggle that is directed, not against individual employers, but against the entire class of capitalists and against the government that supports that class. Only when the individual worker realizes that he is a member of the entire working class, only when he recognises the fact that his petty day-to-day struggle against individual employers and individual government officials is a struggle against the entire bourgeoisie and the entire government, does his struggle become a class struggle.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: On the Foreign Policy of the Soviet State

Support , Country

“Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes).”

Vladimir Lenin

Knowledge , Tree

“The bourgeoisie are today evading taxation by bribery and through their connections; we must close all loopholes.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 27, pp. 383–387.
Collected Works
Source: Revolution!: Sayings of Vladimir Lenin

“Federal Switzerlandization would be a huge step backwards for Germany. Two”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

Source: The State and Revolution

“Thus, in one way or another, the whole world is more or less the debtor to and vassal of these forn international banker countries, the four "pillars" of world finance capital.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter Three
Source: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: Full Text of 1916 Edition

World , Way , Country

“Complete self-government for the province [gubernia and region], district and community through bureaucrats elected by universal suffrage; the abolition of all local and provincial authorities appointed by the state.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

Source: The State and Revolution

Communication , Universe

“All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake “public opinion” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 32, pp. 504–9.
Collected Works
Source: Revolution!: Sayings of Vladimir Lenin

World , Freedom

“There are decades when weeks happen, and weeks when decades happen.”

Vladimir Lenin

or: There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.
Always without citation but supposedly describing the Russian Revolution; earliest quotes online dating ~2005-2006 "Exposing the Big Lie: Interview with George Galloway by Eric Ruder" http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Europe/ExposingBigLie_GGalloway.html
"Johann Hari: Why won't Israel just exchange prisoners? This is such a wacky, left-wing ideal that it was pursued by Ariel Sharon two years ago" http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-why-wont-israel-just-exchange-prisoners-6094888.html, 19 July 2006; popularized describing the Arab Spring. May be loosely based on a similar phrasing by Karl Marx:
How soon the English workers will throw off what seems to be a bourgeois contagion remains to be seen. So far as the main theses in your book [Condition of the Working Class in England] are concerned, by the by, they have been corroborated down to the very last detail by developments subsequent to 1844. For I have again been comparing the book with the notes I made on the ensuing period. Only your small-minded German philistine who measures world history by the ell and by what he happens to think are ‘interesting news items’, could regard 20 years as more than a day where major developments of this kind are concerned, though these may be again succeeded by days into which 20 years are compressed.
Letter, Marx to Engels, 9 April 1863 in Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence 1965, 140 http://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1863/letters/63_04_09.htm
Misattributed

“Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.”

Vladimir Lenin

“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes relentlessly persecute them, and treat their teachings with malicious hostility, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the "consolation" of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating the revolutionary doctrine of its content, vulgarizing it and blunting its revolutionary edge.'”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

1.1, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
(1917)
Source: The State and Revolution

Death , Hostility , Time

“It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it.”

Vladimir Lenin

“There are no morals in politics; the is only experience. A scoundrel may be of use because he is a scoundrel”

Vladimir Lenin

“We are not utopians, we do not indulge in "dreams" of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination; these anarchist dreams… serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until human nature has changed. No, we want the with human nature as it is now, with human nature that cannot dispense with subordination, control and "managers."… The united workers themselves… will hire their own technicians, managers and bookkeepers, and pay them all, as, indeed, every state official, ordinary workmen's wages.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

§ 3.4, Essential Works of Lenin (1966), pp. 307-308
Source: The State and Revolution (1917)

Dreams , Nature , Change

“Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up.”

Vladimir Lenin

“Every society is three meals away from chaos”

Vladimir Lenin

“Attention, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not our task to descend to the level of the 'working masses'.”

Vladimir Lenin

“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?”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism: a popular outline

“We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us.”

Vladimir Lenin

According to the book, "They Never Said It", p. 64, there is no evidence Lenin ever said this. Lenin was supposed to have made his observation to one of his close associates, Grigori Zinoviev, not long after a meeting of the Politburo in the early 1920s, but there is no evidence that he ever did. Experts on the Soviet Union reject the rope quote as spurious.
Misattributed

“An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves. We cannot, unless we have become bourgeois pacifists or opportunists, forget that we are living in a class society from which there is no way out, nor can there be, save through the class struggle. In every class society, whether based on slavery, serfdom, or, as at present, wage-labor, the oppressor class is always armed. Not only the modern standing army, but even the modern militia - and even in the most democratic bourgeois republics, Switzerland, for instance - represent the bourgeoisie armed against the proletariat. That is such an elementary truth that it is hardly necessary to dwell upon it. Suffice it to point to the use of troops against strikers in all capitalist countries.
A bourgeoisie armed against the proletariat is one of the biggest fundamental and cardinal facts of modern capitalist society. And in face of this fact, revolutionary Social-Democrats are urged to “demand” “disarmament”! That is tantamount of complete abandonment of the class-struggle point of view, to renunciation of all thought of revolution. Our slogan must be: arming of the proletariat to defeat, expropriate and disarm the bourgeoisie. These are the only tactics possible for a revolutionary class, tactics that follow logically from, and are dictated by, the whole objective development of capitalist militarism. Only after the proletariat has disarmed the bourgeoisie will it be able, without betraying its world-historic mission, to consign all armaments to the scrap-heap. And the proletariat will undoubtedly do this, but only when this condition has been fulfilled, certainly not before.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution

Truth , World , Way , Learning

“Capitalism in its imperialist stage arrives at the threshold of the most complete socialization of production. In spite of themselves the capitalists are dragged, as it were, into the new social order, which marks the transition from complete free competition to complete socialization. Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The framework of formally recognized free competition remains, but the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter One
Source: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: Full Text of 1916 Edition

Time

“I particularly approve of and welcome the arrest of millionaire saboteurs in the first and second-class railway carriage.”

Vladimir Lenin

“Competition becomes transformed into monopoly. The result is immense progress in the socialisation of production. In particular, the process of technical invention and improvement becomes socialised.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: Full Text of 1916 Edition

“Official science tried, by a conspiracy of silence, to kill the works of Marx, who by a theoretical and historical analysis of capitalism had proved that free competition gives rise to the concentration of production, which, in turn, at a certain stage of development, leads to monopoly.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: Full Text of 1916 Edition

Silence , Science

“Translated into ordinary human language this means that the development of capitalism has arrived at a stage when, although commodity production still “reigns” and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the “geniuses” of financial manipulation.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: Full Text of 1916 Edition

Life , Reality

“In the history of modern socialism this is a phenomenon, that the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement has from national become international.”

Vladimir Lenin

What is to be Done? (1902)

History

“The Guchkov government is held in a vice: bound by the interests of capital, it is compelled to strive to continue the predatory, robber war, to protect the monstrous profits of capital and the landlords, to restore the monarchy. Bound by its revolutionary origin and by the need for an abrupt change from tsarism to democracy, pressed by the bread-hungry and peace-hungry masses, the government is compelled to lie, to wriggle, to play for time, to “proclaim” and promise (promises are the only things that are very cheap even at a time of madly rocketing prices) as much as possible and do as little as possible, to make concessions with one hand and to withdraw them with the other. Under”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917

War , Lie , Peace , Democracy

“Revolution consists not in the new class commanding, governing with the aid of the old state machine, but in this class smashing this machine and commanding, governing with the aid of a new machine.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: State and Revolution

“You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw”

Vladimir Lenin

“Logic is the science not of external forms of thought, but of the laws of development "of all material, natural and spiritual things", i. e., of the development of the entire concrete content of the world and of its cognition, i. e., the sum-total, the conclusion of the History of knowledge of the world.”

Vladimir Lenin

World , Law , History , Nature

“Finance capital is not only interested in the already known sources of raw materials; it is also interested in possible sources of raw materials, because present-day technical development is extremely rapid, and because land which is useless today may be made fertile tomorrow if new methods are applied (to devise these new methods a big bank can equip a whole expedition of engineers, agricultural experts, etc.), and large amounts of capital are invested.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter Six

“Nobody is to be blamed for being born a slave; but a slave who not only eschews a striving for freedom but justifies and eulogies his slavery”

Vladimir Lenin

The War and Russian Social-Democracy (September 1917), The Lenin Anthology
1910s
Context: Nobody is to be blamed for being born a slave; but a slave who not only eschews a striving for freedom but justifies and eulogies his slavery (e. g., calls the throttling of Poland and the Ukraine, etc., a "defense of the fatherland" of the Great Russians") - such a slave is a lickspittle and a boor, who arouses a legitimate feeling of indignation, contempt, and loathing.

Freedom

“Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.”

Vladimir Lenin

Way , Understanding , Evil , Despair

“Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.”

Vladimir Lenin

Youth , World

“Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.”

Vladimir Lenin

“Sometimes - history needs a push.”

Vladimir Lenin

History

“The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.”

Vladimir Lenin

Way

“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them down between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”

Vladimir Lenin

John Maynard Keynes, paraphrase of Lenin Interview http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/04/15/fake-quote-files-v-i-lenin-on-inflation-and-taxation/
Misattributed

Way

“The goal of Socialism is Communism.”

Vladimir Lenin

Communication

“While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.”

Vladimir Lenin

Пока есть государство, нет свободы. Когда будет свобода, не будет государства.
Ch. 5 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm
(1917)
Source: Estado y revolución

Freedom

“Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.”

Vladimir Lenin

Fabricated quote from The Voluntary Way is the American Way (1949) by PR firm Whitaker and Baxter. According to The Heart of Power by David Blumenthal and James Morone (pp. 91-92)
: Whitaker and Baxter published a fifteen-page pamphlet of questions and answers entitled The Voluntary Way is the American Way, which, deep in the Q&A, concocted a quotation from Lenin:
:: Q: Would socialized medicine lead to socialization of other phases of American life?
:: A: Lenin thought so. He declared: socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.
: Senator Murray asked the Library of Congress to track down the quote and, as expected, they found nothing like it—most scholars assume Whitaker and Baxter dreamed it up.
Alternate form: "Socialized medicine is a keystone to the establishment of a socialist state."
Misattributed

“The intellectual forces of the workers and peasants are growing and getting stronger in their fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the educated classes, the lackeys of capital, who consider themselves the brains of the nation. In fact they are not its brains but its shit.”

Vladimir Lenin

Letter from Lenin to Gorky https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/g2aleks.html, Sept. 15, 1919
1910s
Source: The Letters Of Lenin

Fight , Education

“All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery.”

Vladimir Lenin

The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm (March 1913)
1910s
Context: Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect”. And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.

War , Science

“Communism is Soviet government plus the electrification of the whole country. Otherwise the country will remain a country of small peasant economy, and it is up to us to realize this quite clearly.”

Vladimir Lenin

New External and Internal Position and the Problems of the Party (1920); as quoted in The Soviet Power : The Socialist Sixth Of The World (1940) by Hewlett Johnson.
1920s

Communication , Country

“Exchange, fair or unfair, always presupposes and includes the rule of the bourgeoisie.”

Vladimir Lenin

“We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies and are under their almost constant fire. We have combined voluntarily, precisely for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not to retreat into the adjacent marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into a an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation.”

Vladimir Lenin book What Is to Be Done?

Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter One, A. "What is 'Freedom of Criticism'?", Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
Source: What Is to Be Done?

Fight

“And is it not sects, bodies of definite, uncompromising principles, that lead us into revolutions?”

Vladimir Lenin

“It is true that liberty is precious — so precious that it must be rationed.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1936) by Sidney & Beatrice Webb
Attributions
Looking up the reference, the book that is cited is not even quoting him. The quote's origins are the book Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. However, the books states that "...Lenin is said to have once observed that..." so clearly the authors are not quoting directly. The quote really just sounds like the kind of thing an anti-communist dreams.