Vladimir Lenin: Trending quotes

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Vladimir Lenin: 672 quotes145 likes

“There is no doubt that in a country where the overwhelming majority of the population consists of small agricultural producers, a socialist revolution can be carried out only through the implementation of a whole series of special transitional measures which would be superfluous in highly developed capitalist countries where wage-workers in industry and agriculture make up the vast majority.”

Introducing the New Economic Plan, (March, 1921)
1920s

“The way the enemies of the proletariat take advantage of every deviation from a thoroughly consistent communist line was perhaps most strikingly shown in the case of the Kronstadt mutiny, when the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries and whiteguards in all countries of the world immediately expressed their readiness to accept the slogans of the Soviet system, if only they might thereby secure the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, and when the Socialist revolutionaries and the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries in general resorted in Kronstadt to slogans calling for an insurrection against the Soviet Government of Russia ostensibly in the interest of the Soviet power.”

"Resolution on Party Unity" (May, 1921)
1920s

“The economic basis for the complete withering away of the state is such a high stage of development of communism at which the antithesis between mental and physical labour disappears, at which there consequently disappears one of the principal sources of modern social quality - a source, moreover, which cannot on any account be removed immediately by the mere conversion of the means of production into public property, by the mere expropriation of the capitalists.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

The Lenin Anthology, p.379
The State and Revolution (1917)

“A state arises, a special force is created in the form of special bodies of armed men, and every revolution, by destroying the state apparatus, demonstrates to us how the ruling class strives to restore the special bodies of armed men which serve it, and how the oppressed class strives to create a new organization of this kind, capable of serving not the exploiters but the exploited.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

1.2, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
The State and Revolution (1917)

“In such circumstances, in view of the incredibly widespread nature of the distortions of Marxism, our first task is to restore the true doctrine of Marx on the state.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

1.1, Essential Workers of Lenin (1966)
The State and Revolution (1917)

“Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and of monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom. Whatever the political system, the result of these tendencies is everywhere reaction and an extreme intensification of antagonisms in this field. Particularly intensified become the yoke of national oppression and the striving for annexations, i. e., the violation of national independence (for annexation is nothing but the violation of the right of nations to self-determination).”

The Lenin Anthology, p. 268
Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917)

“We must now try to sum up, to draw together the threads of what has been said above on the subject of imperialism. Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly.”

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

“Generally speaking, under capitalism, the ownership of capital is separate from the application of capital to production; money capital is separate from industrial or productive capital; the rentier, living entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all those directly concerned in the management of capital.”

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

“You must side with one of the two immensely wealthy and immensely powerful groups of imperialist predators - that is how capitalist reality poses the basic issue of present-day foreign policy.”

1910s, "The Foreign Policy of the Russian Revolution"

“The basic question of every revolution is that of state power. Unless this question is understood, there can be no intelligent participation in the revolution, not to speak of guidance of the revolution. The highly remarkable feature of our revolution is that it has brought about dual power.”

This fact must be grasped first and foremost: unless it is understood, we cannot advance. We must know how to supplement and amend old "formulas".
Lenin Anthology, p. 301
1910s, "The Dual Power" (1917)

“One step forward, two steps back. … It happens in the lives of individuals, and it happens in the history of nations and in the development of parties. It would be the most criminal cowardice to doubt even for a moment the inevitable and complete triumph of the principle of revolutionary Social-Democracy, of proletarian organization and Party discipline. We have already won a great deal, and we must go on fighting, undismayed by reverses, fighting steadfastly, scorning the philistine methods of circle wrangling, doing our very utmost to preserve the hard-won single Party tie linking all Russian Social-Democrats, and striving by dint of persistent and systematic work to give all Party members, and the workers in particular, a full and conscious understanding of the duties of Party members, of the struggle and Second Party Congress, of all the causes and all the stages of our divergence, and of the utter and disastrousness of opportunism., which, in the sphere of our programme and our tactics, helplessly surrenders to the bourgeois psychology, uncritically adopts the point of view of bourgeois democracy, and blunts the weapon of the class struggle of the proletariat.”

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

“This so-called bipartisan system prevailing in America and Britain has been one of the most powerful means of preventing the rise of an independent working-class, i.e., genuinely socialist, party.”

The Results and Significance of the U.S. Presidential Elections https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/nov/09.htm (November 1912) <br class="br">1910s

“Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown shall never be uprooted.”

As quoted in Pan-Sovietism: The Issue Before America and the World, Bruce Campbell Hopper, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company (1931) p. 87
Attributions

“Without an alliance with non-Communists in the most diverse spheres of activity there can be no question of any successful communist construction.”

“On the Significance of Militant Materialism” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/12.htm, (12 March 1922) <br class="br">1920s

“One may become a demagogue out of sheer political innocence.”

Vladimir Lenin book What Is to Be Done?

Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter Four

“There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience.”

Original: Морали в политике нет, а есть только целесообразность. <br class="br">Source: As quoted in S. D. Mstislavskii (1925), Memoirs. https://twitter.com/DrRadchenko/status/1475027465588416512