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Vladimir Lenin Quotes
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Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the alias Lenin , was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He served as head of government of the Russian Republic from 1917 to 1918, of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1918 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party communist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, he developed political theories known as Leninism.

Born to a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother's execution in 1887. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empire's Tsarist government, he devoted the following years to a law degree. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior figure in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party . In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. After his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent party theorist through his publications. In 1903, he took a key role in a RSDLP ideological split, leading the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov's Mensheviks. Encouraging insurrection during Russia's failed Revolution of 1905, he later campaigned for the First World War to be transformed into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which as a Marxist he believed would cause the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. After the 1917 February Revolution ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, he returned to Russia to play a leading role in the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new regime.

Lenin's Bolshevik government initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, elected soviets, and a multi-party Constituent Assembly, although by 1918 it had centralised power in the new Communist Party. Lenin's administration redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and large-scale industry. It withdrew from the First World War by signing a treaty with the Central Powers and promoted world revolution through the Communist International. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign administered by the state security services; tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. His administration defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 and oversaw the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921. Responding to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin encouraged economic growth through the market-orientated New Economic Policy. Several non-Russian nations secured independence after 1917, but three re-united with Russia through the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922. In increasingly poor health, Lenin expressed opposition to the growing power of his successor, Joseph Stalin, before dying at his dacha in Gorki.

Widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin was the posthumous subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. He became an ideological figurehead behind Marxism-Leninism and thus a prominent influence over the international communist movement. A controversial and highly divisive individual, Lenin is viewed by supporters as a champion of socialism and the working class, while critics on both the left and right emphasize his role as founder and leader of an authoritarian regime responsible for political repression and mass killings.

✵ 10. April 1870 – 21. January 1924   •   Other names Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin
Vladimir Lenin photo
Vladimir Lenin: 336   quotes 145   likes

Vladimir Lenin Quotes

“This transformation of competition into monopoly is one of the most important—if not the most important—phenomena of modern capitalist economy”

Vladimir Lenin

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

“Socialism means keeping account of everything. You will have socialism if you take stock of every piece of iron and cloth.”

Vladimir Lenin
Clothes

“Trust is good, control is better.”

Vladimir Lenin

“The proletarian state must effect the transition to collective farming with extreme caution and only very gradually, by the force of example, without any coercion of the middle peasant.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 31, pp. 152–64.
Collected Works

“It is not national interests we are upholding — we claim that the interests of socialism, the interests of world socialism, rank higher than national interests, higher than the interests of the state. We are defenders of the socialist fatherland.”

Vladimir Lenin

Address to the Party Central Committee (14 May 1918); Collected Works, Vol. 27, pp. 365-381.
1910s

World

“For private property is sacred, and no one can be prohibited from buying, selling, exchanging or mortgaging shares, etc.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter Three
Context: All the rules of control, the publication of balance sheets, the drawing up of balance sheets according ot a definite form, the public auditing of accounts, the things about which well-intentioned professors and officials - that is, those imbued with he good intention of defending and embellishing capitalism - discourse to the public, are of no avail. For private property is sacred, and no one can be prohibited from buying, selling, exchanging or mortgaging shares, etc.

“Imperialism: The final stage of Capitalism.”

Vladimir Lenin

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

“Tsar Nicholas the Bloody, who has dispersed the First and Second Dumas, who has drowned Russia in blood, enslaved Poland and Finland, and is in alliance with out — and-out reactionaries conducting a policy of stifling the Jews and all “aliens”, the tsar whose loyal friends shot down the workers on the Lena and ruined the peasants to the point of starvation all over Russia — that tsar pretends to be the champion of Slav independence and freedom!"”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 41, pp. 262–66
Collected Works

Freedom

“Notwithstanding all the differences in the aims and tasks of the Russian revolution, compared with the French revolution of 1871, the Russian proletariat had to resort to the same method of struggle as that first used by the Paris Commune — civil war. Mindful of the lessons of the Commune, it knew that the proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes.”

Vladimir Lenin

“Lessons of the Commune”, in Zagranichnaya Gazeta, No. 2 (23 March 1908) http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mar/23.htm, as translated by Bernard Isaacs, Collected Works, Vol. 13, p. 478.
1900s
Variant: The proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes. This was first demonstrated by the French proletariat in the Commune and brilliantly confirmed by the Russian proletariat in the December uprising.

War , Peace , Communication , Time

“To be a materialist is to acknowledge objective truth, which is revealed to us by our sense organs.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908), p. 130

Truth , Sense

“In a democratic republic, Engels continues, "wealth wields its power indirectly, all the more effectively," first, by means of the "direct corruption of the officials (America); second, by the means of "the alliance between the government and the Stock Exchange”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

France and America
1.3: The State as an Instrument for the Exploitation of The Oppressed Class, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
The State and Revolution (1917)

Wealth

“History has now confronted us with an immediate task which is the most revolutionary of all the immediate tasks confronting the proletariat of any country. The fulfilment of this task, the destruction of the most powerful bulwark, not only of European, but (it may now be said) of Asiatic reaction, would make the Russian proletariat the vanguard of the international revolutionary proletariat. And we have the right to count upon acquiring this honourable title, already earned by our predecessors, the revolutionaries of the seventies, if we succeed in inspiring our movement, which is a thousand times broader and deeper, with the same devoted determination and vigour.”

Vladimir Lenin

What is to be Done? (1902)

History , Time , Country

“Our business is to help get everything possible done to make sure the "last" chance for a peaceful development of the revolution, to help by the presentation of our programme, by making clear its national character, its absolute accord with the interests and demands of a vast majority of the population.”

Vladimir Lenin

"The Tasks of the Revolution" (9 October 1917) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/09.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 26, 1972, pp. 59 - 68.
1910s

Peace , Business , Chance , Help

“Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.”

Vladimir Lenin

"Lenin's Hanging Order" (11 August 1918), an order for the execution of kulaks, as translated in The Unknown Lenin : From the Secret Archive (1996) by Richard Pipes, p. 50
Variant translation: Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers. … Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: "they are strangling, and will strangle to death, the bloodsucking kulaks".
As translated in Lenin : A Biography (2000) by Robert Service, p. 365.
1910s

Men , People

“To call a fight for the Zionist idea of a Jewish nation, for the federal principle of Party organisation, a “fight for the equality of the Jews in the world family of the proletariat” is to degrade the struggle from the plane of ideas and principles to that of suspicion, incitement and fanning of historically-evolved prejudices. It glaringly reveals a lack of real ideas and principles as weapons of struggle.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 7, pp. 92–103.
Collected Works

World , Family , Idea , Fight

“People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.”

Vladimir Lenin

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

People

“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."”

Vladimir Lenin

Nikola" here is St. Nickolas' Day, as quoted in Autopsy for an Empire (1998) by Dmitri Volkogonov, p. 74.
Attributions

Stupidity

“The real emancipation of the Chinese people from age-long slavery would be impossible without the great, sincerely democratic enthusiasm which is rousing the working masses and making them capable of miracles, and which is evident from every sentence of Sun Yat-sen’s platform.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 18, pp. 163–169.
Collected Works

People , Age , Sun , Sincerity

“Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy. The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker.”

Vladimir Lenin

April Thesis (1917)

Time

“It is not our immediate task to “introduce” socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.”

Vladimir Lenin

April Thesis (1917)

“In our attitude towards the war, which under the new government of Lvov and Co. unquestionably remains on Russia’s part a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of that government, not the slightest concession to “revolutionary defencism” is permissible.”

Vladimir Lenin

April Thesis (1917)

War , Nature , Parting

“Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 21, pp. 158–164.
Collected Works

Peace

“A basic condition for the necessary expansion of political agitation is the organisation of comprehensive political exposure.”

Vladimir Lenin

What is to be Done? (1902)

“Capitalism is commodity production at the highest stage of development, when labor power itself becomes a commodity. The growth of internal exchange, and particularly of international exchange, is a special feature of capitalism. The uneven and spasmodic character of the development of individual enterprises, of individual branches of industry and individual countries, is inevitable under the capitalist system.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter Four, "The Export of Capital"

Country

“The status of women up to now has been compared to that of a slave; women have been tied to the home, and only socialism can save them from this. They will only be completely emancipated when we change from small-scale individual farming to collective farming and collective working of the land.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 28, pp. 180–182.
Collected Works

Women , Home , Change

“Trade unions and strikes cannot help in times of crisis when there is no demand for this “commodity”, they cannot change the conditions which, convert labour-power into a commodity and which doom the masses of working people to dire need and unemployment. To change these conditions, a revolutionary struggle against the whole existing social and political system is necessary; the industrial crisis will convince very many workers of the justice of this statement.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 5, pp. 25–30.
Collected Works

People , Justice , Change , Time

“It is not the business of socialists to help the younger and stronger robbers. Socialists must take advantage of the struggle between the robbers to overthrow all of them. To be able to do this, socialists must first of all tell the people the truth, namely, that this war is, in three respects, a war between slave-holders with the aim of consolidating slavery.”

Vladimir Lenin

Socialism and War (1914), The Lenin Anthology
1910s

War , People , Truth , Business

“You are known among us as a protector of the arts so you must remember that, of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important.”

Vladimir Lenin

Из всех искусств важнейшим для нас является кино.
Conversation with A.V.Lunacharsky (April 1919); also quoted in A Concise History of the Cinema: Before 1940 (1971) by Peter Cowie, p. 137, Complete Works of V.I.Lenin - 5th Edition - Vol. 44. - p. 579.
1910s

Art

“We must pursue the removal of church property by any means necessary in order to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles (do not forget the immense wealth of some monasteries and lauras). Without this fund any government work in general, any economic build-up in particular, and any upholding of soviet principles in Genoa especially is completely unthinkable. In order to get our hands on this fund of several hundred million gold rubles (and perhaps even several hundred billion), we must do whatever is necessary. But to do this successfully is possible only now. All considerations indicate that later on we will fail to do this, for no other time, besides that of desperate famine, will give us such a mood among the general mass of peasants that would ensure us the sympathy of this group, or, at least, would ensure us the neutralization of this group in the sense that victory in the struggle for the removal of church property unquestionably and completely will be on our side.
One clever writer on statecraft correctly said that if it is necessary for the realization of a well-known political goal to perform a series of brutal actions then it is necessary to do them in the most energetic manner and in the shortest time, because masses of people will not tolerate the protracted use of brutality. … Now victory over the reactionary clergy is assured us completely. In addition, it will be more difficult for the major part of our foreign adversaries among the Russian emigres abroad, i. e., the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Milyukovites, to fight against us if we, precisely at this time, precisely in connection with the famine, suppress the reactionary clergy with utmost haste and ruthlessness.
Therefore, I come to the indisputable conclusion that we must precisely now smash the Black Hundreds clergy most decisively and ruthlessly and put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades. … The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie that we succeed in shooting on this occasion, the better because this "audience" must precisely now be taught a lesson in such a way that they will not dare to think about any resistance whatsoever for several decades.”

Vladimir Lenin

Letter to Comrade Molotov for the Politburo (19 March 1922) http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/soviet.exhibit/ae2bkhun.html
Variant translation:
It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables. … I come to the categorical conclusion that precisely at this moment we must give battle to the Black Hundred clergy in the most decisive and merciless manner and crush its resistance with such brutality that it will not forget it for decades to come. The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better.
As translated in The Unknown Lenin : From the Secret Archive (1996) edited by Richard Pipes, pp. 152-4
1920s

People , Way , Mood , Thinking

“We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination, as the immediate task of the coming revolutionary action.”

Vladimir Lenin

"Lessons of the Moscow Uprising" Collected Works, Vol. 11, p. 174.
Collected Works

War , People

“The proletarian revolution calls for a prolonged education of the workers in the spirit of the fullest equality and brotherhood.”

Vladimir Lenin

The War and Russian Social-Democracy (September 1917), The Lenin Anthology
1910s

Education

“Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1972), p. 11.
Attributions

Law

“International unity of the workers is more important than the national.”

Vladimir Lenin

Letter to Inessa Armand (20 November 1916) Collected Works, Vol. 35, pp. 246-247.
1910s

“To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament — this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary- constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 381–492.
Collected Works

People

“Imperialism - the era of bank capital, the era of gigantic capitalist monopolies, the era of the transformation of monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism - has particularly witnessed an unprecedented strengthening of the "state machine" and an unprecedented growth of its bureaucratic and military apparatus, in connection with the increase in repressive measures against the proletariat in the monarchical as well as in the freest republican countries.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

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

Country

“The Poor Peasants’ Committees are necessary to fight the kulaks, the rich, the exploiters, who shackle the working peasants. But between the kulaks, who are a small minority, and the poor or semi-proletarians there is the section of the middle peasants. The Soviet government has never declared or conducted any struggle against them. Any steps or measures to the contrary must be condemned most vigorously and stopped. The socialist government must pursue a policy of agreement with the middle peasants.”

Vladimir Lenin

"Draft of a Telegram to all Soviets of Deputies Concerning the Worker-Peasant Alliance" (16 August 1918) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/16.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 28.
1910s

Fight

“I am not fond of the Germans by any means but at the present time it is more advantageous to use them than to challenge them. An independent Poland is very dangerous to Soviet Russia: it is an evil which, however, at the present time has also its redeeming features; for while it exists, we may safely count on Germany, because the Germans hate Poland and will at any time make common cause with us in order to strangle Poland. … Everything teaches us to look upon Germany as our most reliable ally. Germany wants revenge, and we want revolution. For the moment our aims are the same. When our ways part they will be our most ferocious and our great enemies. Time will tell whether a German hegemony or a Communist federation is to arise out of the ruins of Europe.”

Vladimir Lenin

Quoted from a "Speech to followers" by Ost-Information (Berlin), No. 81 (4 December 1920); as quoted in The Foreign Policies of Soviet Russia (1924) by A. L. O. Dennis, p. 154.
Attributions

Hate , Way , Revenge , Evil

“The transformation of numerous intermediaries into a handful of monopolists represents one of the fundamental processes in the transformation of capitalism into capitalist imperialism.”

Vladimir Lenin

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

“Terrorists bow to the spontaneity of the passionate indignation of intellectuals, who lack the ability or opportunity to connect the revolutionary struggle and the working-class movement into an integral whole. It is difficult indeed for those who have lost their belief, or who have never believed, that this is possible, to find some outlet for their indignation and revolutionary energy other than terror.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 5, pp. 347–530
Collected Works

Passion

“An end to wars, peace among the nations, the cessation of pillaging and violence — such is our ideal, but only bourgeois sophists can seduce the masses with this ideal, if the latter is divorced from a direct and immediate call for revolutionary action.”

Vladimir Lenin

"The Question of Peace" (July–August 1915) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/jul/x02.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 293.
1910s

War , Peace

“You must act with all energy. Mass searches. Execution for concealing arms.”

Vladimir Lenin

Also quoted as "Make mass searches and hold executions for found arms."
Letter to G. F. Fyodorov, August 9, 1918, Collected Works, vol. 35. 35 https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/pdf/lenin-cw-vol-35.pdf
1910s

Search

“We Great-Russian workers want, come what may, a free and independent, a democratic, republican and proud Great Russia, one that will base its neighbors on the human principle of equality, and not on the feudalist principle of privilege, which is so degrading to a great nation.”

Vladimir Lenin

The War and Russian Social-Democracy (September 1917), The Lenin Anthology
1910s

“The progressive historical role of capitalism may be summed up in two brief propositions: increase in the productive forces of social labour, and the socialisation of that labour. But both these facts manifest themselves in extremely diverse processes in different branches of the national economy.”

Vladimir Lenin book The Development of Capitalism in Russia

Source: The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), Chapter Eight

“To become the ruling class and defeat the bourgeoisie the proletariat must be schooled, because the skill this implies does not come ready-made, The proletariat must do its learning in the struggle, and stubborn, desperate struggle in earnest is the only real teacher. The greater the extremes of the exploiters' resistance, the more vigorously, firmly, ruthlessly and successfully will they be suppressed by the exploited.”

Vladimir Lenin

"Fight at the fall of the old and the Fight for the New", Lenin Anthology
Attributions

School , Learning , Teachers

“We know that an unskilled labourer or a cook cannot immediately get on with the job of state administration.”

Vladimir Lenin

Will the Bolsheviks Retain Government Power? (1917); this is often misquoted as "every cook must learn to govern the state" or even "every cook can govern the state."
1910s

Cooking

“The worker is becoming impoverished absolutely, i. e., he is actually becoming poorer than before; he is compelled to live worse, to eat worse, to suffer hunger more, and to live in basements and attics.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 18, pp. 435–436.
Collected Works

Hunger , Suffering

“The functionaries of our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted — or rather tend to be corrupted — by the conditions of capitalism and betray a tendency to become bureaucrats, i. e., privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

Ch. 6 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch06.htm
The State and Revolution (1917)

People , Personality

“Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness — voilà the epistemological roots of idealism.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 38, pp. 357–61
Collected Works

“What caused the war? The greed of the Italian money bags and capitalists, who need new markets and new achievements for Italian imperialism. What kind of war was it? A perfected, civilised blood bath, the massacre of Arabs with the help of the “latest” weapons.”

Vladimir Lenin

"The End of the Italo-Turkish War" in Pravda, No. 129 (28 September 1912) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/sep/28.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 18.
1910s

Money , War , Help , Perfection