Vladimir Lenin: Trending quotes (page 7)

“The Party is carried on though the Soviets, which embrace the working masses, irrespective of occupation. The district congresses of Soviet are democratic institutions, the like of which even the best of the democratic republics of the bourgeois world have never known; through these con tresses, as well as by continually appointing class-conscious workers to various posts in the rural districts, the proletariat exercises its role of leader of the peasantry, gives effect to the dictatorship of the urban proletariat, wages, a systematic struggle against the rich, bourgeois, exploiting and profiteering peasantry, etc.”

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)

World , Exercises

“I don't care what becomes of Russia. To hell with it … All this is only the road to a World Revolution.”

Vladimir Lenin

Statement after the October Revolution of 1917, as quoted in "Communists: The Battle over the Tomb" in TIME (24 April 1964).
Attributions

World , Hell

“When the speeches of Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George, the worst of the predators, the wild beasts of imperialism, are repeated here by Martov in the name of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party … then I say to myself that we have to be on the alert and to realise that the Cheka is indispensable!”

Vladimir Lenin

Address to the Seventh All-Russia Congress (5 December 1919); Collected Works, Vol. 30.
1910s

“The trial of the insurrectionists from Shuia, for opposing aid to the starving, should be carried out in utmost haste and should end not other than with the shooting of the very largest number of the most influential and dangerous of the Black Hundreds in Shuia, and, if possible, not only in this city but even in Moscow and several other ecclesiastical centers.”

Vladimir Lenin

Letter to Comrade Molotov for the Politburo (19 March 1922).
1920s

“Victory will belong only to those who have faith in the people, those who are immersed in the life-giving spring of popular creativity.”

Vladimir Lenin

"Meeting Of The All-Russia Central Executive Committee" (4 November 1917) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/nov/04a.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 285-293.
1910s

Life , People , Faith , Spring

“If democracy, in essence, means the abolition of class domination, then why should not a socialist minister charm the whole bourgeois world by orations on class collaboration?”

Vladimir Lenin

What is to be Done? (1902)

World , Democracy

“Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation.”

Vladimir Lenin

The Three Sources and Three Constituent Parts of Marxism (March 1913)
1910s

“Crises of every kind - economic crises more frequently, but not only these - in their turn increase very considerably the tendency towards concentration and monopoly”

Vladimir Lenin

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

“I am confident that the suppression of the Kazan Czechs and White Guards, and likewise of the bloodsucking kulaks who support them, will be a model of mercilessness.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (1981), p. 119.
Attributions

Confidence , Support

“Humanity has not yet evolved and we do not as yet know a type of government superior to and better than the Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 38–41.
Collected Works

“The Bolsheviks will do everything to secure this peaceful development of the revolution.”

Vladimir Lenin

"The Russian Revolution And Civil War" (29 September 1917) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/sep/29.htm; in Collected Works, Vol. 26, 1972, pp. 28-42.
1910s

Peace

“Marx said that the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat lies between capitalism and communism. The more the proletariat presses the bourgeoisie, the more furiously they will resist. We know what vengeance was wreaked on the workers in France in 1848. And when people charge us with harshness we wonder how they can forget the rudiments of Marxism.”

Vladimir Lenin

Speech to the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission Staff (7 November 1918); Collected Works, Vol. 28, pp. 169-70 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/nov/07b.htm
1910s

People , Communication , Forgetting

“The reflection of nature in man’s thought must be understood not lifelessly but in the eternal process of movement, the arising of contradictions and their solution.”

Vladimir Lenin

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908)

Nature

“After retaining power for two months and ten days, the workers of Paris, who for the first time in history established the Commune, the embryo of Soviet power, perished at the hands of the French Cadets, Mensheviks and Right Socialist-Revolutionaries of a Kaledin type. The French workers had to pay an unprecedentedly heavy price for the first experience of workers' government, the meaning and purpose of which the overwhelming majority of the peasants in France did not know.”

Vladimir Lenin

“Report on the Activities of the Council of People’s Commissars” (23-31 January 1918) http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/TCS18.html, as translated by Yuri Sdobnikov and George Hanna, Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 459-61.
1910s

History , Communication , Time

“For any truth, if overdone (as Dietzgen Senior put it), if exaggerated, or if carried beyond the limits of its applicability, can be reduced to absurdity.”

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

"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

Truth

“… carry out merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guards; unreliable elements to be locked up in a concentration camp outside the town.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (1981), page 103.
Attributions

“The most reliable and best armed groups of the mass of revolutionary contingents organised to take extreme measures to overcome the famine shall be detailed for dispatch to all stations and all uyezds of the principal grain supplying gubernias. These groups, with the participation of railwaymen delegated by local railway committees, shall be authorised, firstly, to control the movement of grain freights; secondly, take charge of the collection and storage of grain; thirdly, adopt the most extreme revolutionary measures to fight speculators and to requisition grain stocks. When making any record of requisition, arrest or execution, the revolutionary contingents shall summon at least six witnesses to be selected from the poorest section of the population closest at hand.”

Vladimir Lenin

“Meeting of the Presidium of the Petrograd Soviet With Delegates From the Food Supply Organisations” (27 January 1918); Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 503.
1910s

Fight

“War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals… ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat’ – this is the practical commandment of socialism… [Our] common aim [is] to clean the land of Russia of all vermin, of fleas – the rogues, of bugs – the rich, and so on and so forth.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in How to Organise Competition? Collected Works, Vol. 26, pages. 411, 414.
Attributions

Death , War

“We shall not bind ourselves by treaties. We shall not allow ourselves to be entangled by treaties. We reject all clauses on plunder and violence, but we shall welcome all clauses containing provisions for good-neighbourly relations and all economic agreements; we cannot reject these.”

Vladimir Lenin

Concluding Speech Following the Discussion On the Report of Peace (8 November 1917) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/25-26/26c.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 26.
1910s

“Although the Russian bourgeois revolution of 1905-07 displayed no such “brilliant” successes as at time fell to the Portuguese and Turkish revolutions, it was undoubtedly a "real people's" revolution, since the mass of the people, their majority, the very lowest social groups, crushed by oppression and exploitation, rose independently and stamped on the entire course of the revolution the imprint of their own demands, their attempt to build in their own way a new society in place of the old society that was being destroyed.”

Vladimir Lenin

Ch. 3 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch03.htm
(1917)

People , Way , Time , Success