Vladimir Lenin: Trending quotes (page 13)

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“Hundreds of thousands and millions of wage slaves of capital and peasants downtrodden by the serf-owners are going to the slaughter for the dynastic interests of a handful of crowned brigands, for the profits of the bourgeoisie in its drive to plunder foreign lands.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 41.
Collected Works

“To belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology; for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism, and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy.”

Vladimir Lenin

What is to be Done? (1902)

Way , Democracy

“The statement that cartels can abolish crises is a fable spread by bourgeois economists who at all costs desire to place capitalism in a favorable light. On the contrary, when monopoly appears in certain branches of industry, it increases and intensifies the anarchy inherent in capitalist production as a whole.”

Vladimir Lenin

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

Light , Appearance

“The state is the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability class antagonisms. The state arises when, where and to the extent that class antagonisms cannot be objectively reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.”

Vladimir Lenin

1.1, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
(1917)

“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.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 398–421.
Collected Works

War

“The principal feature of modern capitalism is the domination of monopolist combines of the big capitalists.”

Vladimir Lenin

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

“He who accepts the class struggle cannot fail to accept civil wars, which in every class society are the natural, and under certain conditions inevitable, continuation, development and intensification of the class struggle… To repudiate civil war, or to forget about it, is to fall into extreme opportunism and renounce the socialist revolution.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution, Collected Works, Vol. 23, pages 78-9.
Attributions

War , Nature , Forgetting

“It is logical to assert that all matter possesses a property which is essentially akin to sensation, the property of reflection.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 14, pp. 17–362.
Collected Works

“The capture of Simbirsk, my home town, is a wonderful tonic, the best treatment for my wounds. I feel a new lease of life and energy.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 28, p. 98.
Collected Works

Life , Feeling , Home

“In its struggle for power the proletariat has no other weapon but organisation. Disunited by the rule of anarchic competition in the bourgeois world, ground down by forced labour for capital, constantly thrust back to the 'lower depths' of utter destitution, savagery, and degeneration, the proletariat can, and inevitably will become an invincible force only through its ideological unification on the principles of Marxism being reinforced by the material unity of organisation, which welds millions of toilers into an army of the working class.”

Vladimir Lenin

Lenin Anthology, pp. 119
1900s, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904)

World

“It is in prison … that one becomes a real revolutionary.”

Vladimir Lenin

Attributed in "Communists: The Battle over the Tomb" in TIME (24 April 1964).
Attributions

“First, we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia, then we will encircle the United States which will be the last bastion of capitalism. We will not have to attack. It will fall like an overripe fruit into our hands.”

Vladimir Lenin

Cardinal Francis Spellman used this attribution in his speech to the 1954 National Convention of the American Legion. It has been debunked repeatedly, for example in They Never Said It (1999) by Paul F. Boller and John H. George. The last two sentences have also been misattributed to Nikita Krushchev. The metaphor of the ripe fruit appears much earlier in US policy discussions about Cuba:
If an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its unnatural connexion with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can only gravitate towards the North American Union.
John Quincy Adams, letter to Hugh Nelson (28 April 1823)
The fruit will fall into our hands when it is ripe, without an officious shaking of the tree. Cuba will be ours … in due season, without the wicked impertinence of war.
Parke Godwin, "Annexation" (February 1854)
Misattributed

“The principal and primary function of banks is to serve as an intermediary in the making of payments. In doing so they transform inactive money capital into active capital, that is, into capital producing a profit; they collect all kinds of money revenues and place them at the disposal of the capitalist class.”

Vladimir Lenin

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

Money

“Use both bribery and threats to exterminate every Cossack to a man if they set fire to the oil in Guriev.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Richard Pipes, The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (1996), p. 69.
Attributions

“The practical activity of man had to lead his consciousness to the reptetition of various logical figures thousands of millions of times in order that these figures could obtain the significance of axioms.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 172.
Collected Works

Time

“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.”

Vladimir Lenin

What is to be Done? (1902)

Fear , Question , Freedom , Sincerity

“The uprising of the five kulak districts should be mercilessly suppressed… Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers… Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts [km] around, the people will see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Richard Pipes, The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (1996), page 50.
Attributions

Death , Men , People , Way

“We are waging a struggle against the "labour aristocracy" in the name of the masses of the workers and in order to win them over to our side; we are waging struggle against he opportunist and social chauvinist leaders in order to win the working class over to our side.”

Vladimir Lenin book "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder

CH 5, "Left Wing Communism in Germany. The Leaders, the Party, the Class, the Mass"
"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

“Every cook must learn to rule the State.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Woman's Place by Florence Becker, in New International, Vol. 2 No. 5 (August 1935), pp.175-176; also in Woman in Soviet Russia (1935) by Fannina W. Halle.
Attributions

Learning , Cooking