1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Lenin Quotes
page 4

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

“The exploiting classes need political rule in order to maintain exploitation, i. e., in the selfish interests of an insignificant minority and against the interests of the vast majority of the people. The exploited classes need political rule in order completely to abolish all exploitation, i. e., in the interests of the vast majority of the people, and against the interests of the insignificant minority consisting of the modern slave-owners - the landlords and the capitalists.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

2.1, "The Eve of The Revolution", Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
The State and Revolution (1917)

People , Selfishness

“When we say "the state," the state is We, it is we, it is the proletariat, it is the advanced guard of the working class.”

Vladimir Lenin

Speech (27 May 1922).
1920s

“The big banks are the "state apparatus" which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready-made from capitalism' our task here is merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive. Quantity will be transformed into quality. A single State Bank, the biggest of the big, with branches in every rural district, in every factory, will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus.”

Vladimir Lenin

"Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?", (1917), The Lenin Anthology
1910s

“A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.”

Vladimir Lenin

What is to be Done? (1902)

“Treat the Jews (express it politely: Jewish petty bourgeoisie) and urban inhabitants in the Ukraine with an iron rod, transferring them to the front, not letting them into the government agencies (except in an insignificant percentage, in particularly exceptional circumstances, under class control).”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Richard Pipes, The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (1996), p. 77.
Attributions

“The proletariat needs state power, the centralized organization of force, the organization of violence, for the purpose of crushing the resistance of the exploiters and for the purpose of leading the great mass of the population - the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, the semi-proletarians - in the work of organizing a socialist economy.”

Vladimir Lenin

2.1, "The Eve of The Revolution", Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
(1917)

“Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence… The class struggle did not accidentally assume its latest form, the form in which the exploited class takes all the means of power in its own hands in order to completely destroy its class enemy, the bourgeoisie…”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Report on the Activities of the Council of People’s Commissars, Collected Works, Vol. 26, pages 459-61.
Attributions

History , Problem

“When we are reproached with having established a dictatorship of one party… we say, ‘Yes, it is a dictatorship of one party! This is what we stand for and we shall not shift from that position…”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Speech to the First All-Russia Congress of Workers in Education and Socialist Culture, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 535).
Attributions

“Sensation is a subjective image of the objective world.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908), p. 116

World

“The Congress decisively rejects terrorism, i. e., the system of individual political assassinations, as being a method of political struggle which is most inexpedient at the present time, diverting the best forces from the urgent and imperatively necessary work of organisation and agitation, destroying contact between the revolutionaries and the masses of the revolutionary classes of the population, and spreading both among the revolutionaries themselves and the population in general utterly distorted ideas of the aims and methods of struggle against the autocracy.”

Vladimir Lenin

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1903/2ndcong/5.htm
Second Congress of the RSDLP: Drafts of Minor Resolutions
July–August
1903
Collected Works
6
yes
Lenin
Vladimir Ilich
Marxists.
1900s

Idea , Decision , Time

“We must '"go among all classes of the people" as theoreticians, as propagandists, as agitators and as organizers.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter Three, Section E, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)

People

“The nearer we come to the full military suppression of the bourgeoisie, the more dangerous becomes to us the high flood of petty-bourgeois Anarchism. And the struggle against these elements cannot be waged with propaganda and agitation alone. … The struggle must also be waged by applying force and compulsion.”

Vladimir Lenin

The Guillotine At Work : Twenty Years of Terror In Russia (1940) by Grigoriĭ Petrovich Maksimov, p. 38.
Attributions

“The passing of state power from one class to another is the first, the principal, the basic sign of a revolution, both in the strictly scientific and in the practical political meaning of that term.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 42–54.
Collected Works

“Disarmament is the ideal of socialism. There will be no wars in and the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a socialist. Dictatorship is state power based directly on violence. And in the twentieth century — as in the age of civilisation generally — violence means neither a fist nor a club, but troops. To put “disarmament” in the programme is tantamount to making the general declaration: We are opposed to the use of arms. There is as little Marxism in this as there would be if we were to say: We are opposed to violence!”

Vladimir Lenin

"The “Disarmament” Slogan" (October 1916) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/01.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 94-104.
1910s

War , Age

“Down with all colonial policy, down with the whole policy of intervention and capitalist struggle for the conquest of foreign lands and foreign populations, for new privileges, new markets, control of the Straits, etc.!”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 15, p. 229.
Collected Works

“It is I think, almost universally realized at present that the Bolsheviks could not have retained power for two and a half month, let alone two and a half years, without the most rigorous and truly iron discipline in our Party, or without the fullest unreserved support from the entire mass of the working class, that is, from all thinking, honest, devoted and influential elements in it, capable of leading the backward strata or carrying the latter along with them.”

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

Source: "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920), CH. 2 An Essential Condition of the Bolsheviks' Success

Support , Thinking , Universe

“Let us… take the most concrete example of state capitalism… It is Germany. Here we have the 'last word' in modern, large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organization, subordinated to Junker-bourgeois imperialism. Cross out the words in italics and [substitute] a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, and you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism.”

Vladimir Lenin

"Left Wing' Childishness", Pravda (May 1918).
1910s

“In a country ruled by an autocracy, with a completely enslaved press, in a period of desperate political reaction in which even the tiniest outgrowth of political discontent and protest is persecuted, the theory of revolutionary Marxism suddenly forced its way into the censored literature before the government realised what had happened and the unwieldy army of censors and gendarmes discovered the new enemy and flung itself upon him.”

Vladimir Lenin

What is to be Done? (1902)

Way , Literature , Country

“You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action. A plenary meeting of the Soviet must be called to decide on mass searches in Petrograd and the goods stations. To carry out these searches, each factory and company must form contingents, not on a voluntary basis: it must be the duty of everyone to take part in these searches under the threat of being deprived of his bread card. We can't expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism: speculators must be shot on the spot. Moreover, bandits must be dealt with just as resolutely: they must be shot on the spot.”

Vladimir Lenin

“Meeting of the Presidium of the Petrograd Soviet With Delegates From the Food Supply Organisations" (27 January 1918) http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/MPPS18.html Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 501.
1910s

Search , Parting

“The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government.”

Vladimir Lenin

April Thesis (1917)

“A full definition of an object must include the whole of human experience, both as a criterion of truth and a practical indicator of its connection with human wants.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 32, p.  94.
Collected Works

Truth

“Hence, political exposure in themselves serve as a powerful instrument for disintegrating the system we oppose, the means for diverting from he enemy his casual or temporary allies, the means for spreading enmity and distrust among those who permanently share power with the autocracy.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter Three, Section E, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)

“No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies!”

Vladimir Lenin

"How to Organise Competition?" (27 December 1917) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/dec/25.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 411, 414.
1910s

Death , War , People

“In no country in the world are the majority of the population oppressed so much as in Russia; Great Russians constitute only 43 per cent of the population, i. e., less than half; the non-Russians are denied all rights.”

Vladimir Lenin

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

World , Country

“If the world is eternally moving and developing matter (as the Marxists think), reflected by the developing human consciousness, what is there “static” here? The point at issue is not the immutable essence of things, or an immutable consciousness, but the correspondence between the consciousness which reflects nature and the nature which is reflected by consciousness.”

Vladimir Lenin

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908)

World , Nature , Thinking

“As long as the bourgeois parliament remains a means of duping the workers, and phrases about “democracy” are used to cover up financial swindling and every kind of bribery (the particularly “subtle” brand of bribery the bourgeoisie practise with regard to writers, N. P. s, lawyers, and others is nowhere to be seen on so wide a scale as in the bourgeois parliament), we Communists are in duty bound to be in this very institution (which is supposed to express the people’s will but actually covers up the deception of the people by the wealthy) to untiringly expose this deception, and expose each and every case of the Renners and Co.’s desertion to the capitalists, against the workers”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 31, pp. 267–69.
Collected Works

People , Democracy

“To accept anything on trust, to preclude critical application and development, is a grievous sin; and in order to apply and develop, “simple interpretation” is obviously not enough.”

Vladimir Lenin

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1900/mar/x01.htm
Uncritical Criticism
January–March
1900
Collected Works
3
yes
Lenin
Vladimir Ilich
Marxists.
1900s

“The government considers it the greatest of crimes against humanity to continue this war over the issue of how to divide among the strong and rich nations the weak nationalities they have conquered, and solemnly announces its determination immediately to sign terms of peace to stop this war on the terms indicated, which are equally just for all nationalities without exception.”

Vladimir Lenin

Report on Peace (8 November 1917) http://marx.org/archive/lenin/works//1917/oct/25-26/26b.htm, Lenin's Collected Works, Vol. 26.
1910s

War , Peace , Strong

“A monopoly, once it is formed and controls thousands of millions, inevitably penetrates into every sphere of public life, regardless of the form of government and all other "details."”

Vladimir Lenin

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

Life

“Do everything to demonstrate, and in the most emphatic manner, our sympathy for the Moslems, their autonomy, independence, etc.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 30, p. 494.
Collected Works

“Class consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only outside of the economic struggle, outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the phere of relationships between all the various classes and strata and the state and the government-the sphere of the interrelations between all the various classes.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter Three, Section D, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)

Knowledge

“We can’t expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism: speculators must be shot on the spot. Moreover, bandits must be dealt with just as resolutely: they must be shot on the spot.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Meeting of the Presidium of the Petrograd Soviet With Delegates From the Food Supply Organisations, Collected Works, Vol. 26, page 501.
Attributions

“The bourgeois court, which claimed to maintain order, but which, as a matter of fact, was a blind, subtle instrument for the ruthless suppression of the exploited, and an instrument for protecting the interests of the moneybags.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 453–482.
Collected Works

“When the Soviet government is experiencing a difficult period and plots are being hatched by bourgeois elements and when at a critical moment we manage to lay bare these plots — do they think they are discovered accidentally? Oh, no, not accidentally. They are discovered because the plotters live among the masses, because they cannot succeed in their plots without the workers and peasants and it is there that, in the long run, they run up against people who go to that badly organised, as they said here, Cheka and say that exploiters are gathered in a certain place.”

Vladimir Lenin

Address to the Seventh All-Russia Congress (5 December 1919) http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/SARCS19.html; Collected Works, Vol. 30.
1910s

People , Thinking

“I absolutely do not pretend in the slightest fashion to knowledge of military science.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Stalin : A Biography (2004) by Robert Service, p. 183.
1920s

Fashion , Knowledge , Science

“From the vulgar bourgeois standpoint the terms dictatorship and democracy are mutually exclusive. Failing to understand the theory of class struggle, and accustomed to seeing in the political arena the petty squabbling of the various bourgeois circles and coteries, the bourgeois conceives dictatorship to mean the annulment of all the liberties and guarantees of democracy, tyranny of every kind, and every sort of abuse of power in the personal interests of a dictator.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 31.
Collected Works

Democracy , Understanding , Personality

“Repudiation of the Party principle and of Party discipline - that is what the opposition has arrived at. And this is tantamount to completely disarming the proletariat in the interests of the bourgeoisie It all ads up to that petty-bourgeois diffuseness and instability, that incapacity for sustained effort, unity and organized actions, which, if encouraged, must inevitably destroy any proletarian revolutionary movement.”

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)

Effort

“We shall not achieve socialism without a struggle. But we are ready to fight, we have started it and we shall finish it with the aid of the apparatus called the Soviets.”

Vladimir Lenin

Report on the Activities of the Council of People’s Commissars (24 January 1918); Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 459-61.
1910s

Fight

“We have invited and continue to invite the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to share power with us.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 304–308.
Collected Works

“Surely you do not imagine that we shall be victorious without applying the most cruel revolutionary terror?”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (1981), page 57.
Attributions

Imagination , Victory

“In the two months following the revolution the industrialists have robbed the whole of Russia.”

Vladimir Lenin

"War and Revolution" (May 1917) http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/may/14.htm, Collected Works, Vol. 24.
1910s

“There are at present 300,000 bourgeois in the Crimea. These are a source of future profiteering, espionage and every kind of aid to the capitalists. However, we are not afraid of them. We say that we shall take and distribute them, make them submit, and assimilate them.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Vol. 31, pp. 438–59.
Collected Works

Future

“Human reason has discovered many amazing things in nature and will discover still more, and will thereby increase its power over nature.”

Vladimir Lenin

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908)

Nature

“When we are reproached with having established a dictatorship of one party and, as you have heard, a united socialist front is proposed, we say, "Yes, it is a dictatorship of one party! This is what we stand for and we shall not shift from that position because it is the party that has won, in the course of decades, the position of vanguard of the entire factory and industrial proletariat. This party had won that position even before the revolution of 1905. It is the party that was at the head of the workers in 1905 and which since then — even at the time of the reaction after 1905 when the working-class movement was rehabilitated with such difficulty under the Stolypin Duma — merged with the working class and it alone could lead that class to a profound, fundamental change in the old society.”

Vladimir Lenin

“Speech to the First All-Russia Congress of Workers in Education and Socialist Culture” (30 July 1919) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/aug/05.htm Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 535.
1910s

Change , Time

“It is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush its resistance. This was particularly necessary for the Commune; and one of the reasons for its defeat was that it did not do this with sufficient determination. But the organ of suppression is now the majority of the population, and not the minority, as was always the case under slavery, serfdom and wage-slavery. And since the majority of the of the people itself suppresses its oppressors, a "special force" for suppression is no longer necessary. in this sense the state begins to wither away. Instead of the special institutions of a privileged minority.. the majority can directly fulfill all these functions, and the more the functions of state power devolve upon the people generally, the less need is there for the existence of this power.”

Vladimir Lenin

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

People , Communication , Sense

“Russians are too kind, they lack the ability to apply determined methods of revolutionary terror.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy (1994), p. 203.
Attributions

“To hoard surpluses of grain and other food products at a time when the people in Petrograd, in Moscow, and in dozens of non-agricultural uyezds are not only suffering from a shortage of bread, but are cruelly starving, is an enormous crime deserving the most ruthless punishment.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 42, pp. 94–95.
Collected Works

People , Food , Suffering , Time

“We, the Great-Russian proletarians, who defend no privileges whatever, do not defend this privilege either. We are fighting on the ground of a definite state; we unite the workers of all nations living in this state; we cannot vouch for any particular path of national development, for we are marching to our class goal along all possible paths.”

Vladimir Lenin

"Right of Nations to Self-Determination", (1904), The Lenin Anthology
1910s

Fight

“You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 31.
Collected Works

Knowledge

“Perhaps the profoundest cause of disagreement with the Narodniks is the difference in our fundamental views on social and economic processes. When studying the latter, the Narodnik usually draws conclusions that point to some moral; he does not regard the diverse groups of persons taking part in production as creators of various forms of life; he does not set out to present the sum-total of social and economic relationships as the result of the mutual relations between these groups, which have different interests and different historical roles.”

Vladimir Lenin book The Development of Capitalism in Russia

The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899)

Life , Study , Parting , Drawing