Lénine citations (347 citations) | Citations célèbres

Not found in Lenin's Collected Works. Began to surface on the internet in the mid-1990s.
Misattributed
Variante: One man with a gun can control a hundred without one.

“When a liberal is abused, he says, ‘Thank God they didn’t beat me.’ When he is beaten, he thanks God they didn’t kill him. When he is killed, he will thank God that his immortal soul has been delivered from its mortal clay.”

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Vladimir Lenin

“The task of a truly revolutionary party is not to declare that it is impossible to renounce all compromises, but to be able, through all compromises, when they are unavoidable, to remain true to its principles, to its class, to its revolutionary purpose, to its task of paving the way for revolution and educating the mass of the people for victory in the revolution.”

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Vladimir Lenin

“When the workers of a single factory or of a single branch of industry engage in struggle against their employer or employers, is this class struggle? No, this is only a weak embryo of it. The struggle of the workers becomes a class struggle only when all the foremost representatives of the entire working class of the whole country are conscious of themselves as a single working class and launch a struggle that is directed, not against individual employers, but against the entire class of capitalists and against the government that supports that class. Only when the individual worker realizes that he is a member of the entire working class, only when he recognises the fact that his petty day-to-day struggle against individual employers and individual government officials is a struggle against the entire bourgeoisie and the entire government, does his struggle become a class struggle.”

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Vladimir Lenin

Source: On the Foreign Policy of the Soviet State

“In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favorable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slaveowners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that “they cannot be bothered with democracy,” “cannot be bothered with politics”; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life. The”

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Vladimir Lenin

Source: The State and Revolution (1917), Ch. 5
Contexte: Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the "petty" – supposedly petty – details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for "paupers"!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc., – we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.

“What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy. [Addressing to a delegation of Italian socialists in Moscow after Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922]”

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Vladimir Lenin

“Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners.”

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Vladimir Lenin livre L'État et la Révolution

Source: The State and Revolution (1917), Ch. 5.

“Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes).”

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Vladimir Lenin

“America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism.”

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Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 28, p. 62–75.
Collected Works
Source: A Letter to American Workingmen: From the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia

“The bourgeoisie are today evading taxation by bribery and through their connections; we must close all loopholes.”

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Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 27, pp. 383–387.
Collected Works
Source: Revolution!: Sayings of Vladimir Lenin

“Federal Switzerlandization would be a huge step backwards for Germany. Two”

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Vladimir Lenin livre L'État et la Révolution

Source: The State and Revolution

“Thus, in one way or another, the whole world is more or less the debtor to and vassal of these forn international banker countries, the four "pillars" of world finance capital.”

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Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter Three
Source: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: Full Text of 1916 Edition

“Complete self-government for the province [gubernia and region], district and community through bureaucrats elected by universal suffrage; the abolition of all local and provincial authorities appointed by the state.”

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Vladimir Lenin livre L'État et la Révolution

Source: The State and Revolution

“All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake “public opinion” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.”

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Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 32, pp. 504–9.
Collected Works
Source: Revolution!: Sayings of Vladimir Lenin

“There are decades when weeks happen, and weeks when decades happen.”

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Vladimir Lenin

or: There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen. Always without citation but supposedly describing the Russian Revolution; earliest quotes online dating ~2005-2006 "Exposing the Big Lie: Interview with George Galloway by Eric Ruder" http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Europe/ExposingBigLie_GGalloway.html "Johann Hari: Why won't Israel just exchange prisoners? This is such a wacky, left-wing ideal that it was pursued by Ariel Sharon two years ago" http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-why-wont-israel-just-exchange-prisoners-6094888.html, 19 July 2006; popularized describing the Arab Spring. May be loosely based on a similar phrasing by Karl Marx: How soon the English workers will throw off what seems to be a bourgeois contagion remains to be seen. So far as the main theses in your book [Condition of the Working Class in England] are concerned, by the by, they have been corroborated down to the very last detail by developments subsequent to 1844. For I have again been comparing the book with the notes I made on the ensuing period. Only your small-minded German philistine who measures world history by the ell and by what he happens to think are ‘interesting news items’, could regard 20 years as more than a day where major developments of this kind are concerned, though these may be again succeeded by days into which 20 years are compressed. Letter, Marx to Engels, 9 April 1863 in Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence 1965, 140 http://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1863/letters/63_04_09.htm Misattributed

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”

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Vladimir Lenin

“Without Revolutionary theory, there can be no Revolutionary Movement.”

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Vladimir Lenin

“Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.”

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Vladimir Lenin

“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes relentlessly persecute them, and treat their teachings with malicious hostility, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the "consolation" of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating the revolutionary doctrine of its content, vulgarizing it and blunting its revolutionary edge.'”

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Vladimir Lenin livre L'État et la Révolution

1.1, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
(1917)
Source: The State and Revolution

“It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it.”

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Vladimir Lenin

“There are no morals in politics; the is only experience. A scoundrel may be of use because he is a scoundrel”

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Vladimir Lenin

“We are not utopians, we do not indulge in "dreams" of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination; these anarchist dreams… serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until human nature has changed. No, we want the with human nature as it is now, with human nature that cannot dispense with subordination, control and "managers."… The united workers themselves… will hire their own technicians, managers and bookkeepers, and pay them all, as, indeed, every state official, ordinary workmen's wages.”

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Vladimir Lenin livre L'État et la Révolution

§ 3.4, Essential Works of Lenin (1966), pp. 307-308
Source: The State and Revolution (1917)

“Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up.”

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Vladimir Lenin

“Every society is three meals away from chaos”

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Vladimir Lenin

“Attention, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not our task to descend to the level of the 'working masses'.”

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Vladimir Lenin

“But suppose, for the sake of argument, free competition, without any sort of monopoly, would develop capitalism trade more rapidly. Is it not a fact that the more rapidly trade and capitalism develop, the greater is the concentration of production and capital which gives rise to monopoly?”

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Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism: a popular outline

“We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us.”

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Vladimir Lenin

According to the book, "They Never Said It", p. 64, there is no evidence Lenin ever said this. Lenin was supposed to have made his observation to one of his close associates, Grigori Zinoviev, not long after a meeting of the Politburo in the early 1920s, but there is no evidence that he ever did. Experts on the Soviet Union reject the rope quote as spurious.
Misattributed

“An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves. We cannot, unless we have become bourgeois pacifists or opportunists, forget that we are living in a class society from which there is no way out, nor can there be, save through the class struggle. In every class society, whether based on slavery, serfdom, or, as at present, wage-labor, the oppressor class is always armed. Not only the modern standing army, but even the modern militia - and even in the most democratic bourgeois republics, Switzerland, for instance - represent the bourgeoisie armed against the proletariat. That is such an elementary truth that it is hardly necessary to dwell upon it. Suffice it to point to the use of troops against strikers in all capitalist countries.
A bourgeoisie armed against the proletariat is one of the biggest fundamental and cardinal facts of modern capitalist society. And in face of this fact, revolutionary Social-Democrats are urged to “demand” “disarmament”! That is tantamount of complete abandonment of the class-struggle point of view, to renunciation of all thought of revolution. Our slogan must be: arming of the proletariat to defeat, expropriate and disarm the bourgeoisie. These are the only tactics possible for a revolutionary class, tactics that follow logically from, and are dictated by, the whole objective development of capitalist militarism. Only after the proletariat has disarmed the bourgeoisie will it be able, without betraying its world-historic mission, to consign all armaments to the scrap-heap. And the proletariat will undoubtedly do this, but only when this condition has been fulfilled, certainly not before.”

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Vladimir Lenin

Source: The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution

“Capitalism in its imperialist stage arrives at the threshold of the most complete socialization of production. In spite of themselves the capitalists are dragged, as it were, into the new social order, which marks the transition from complete free competition to complete socialization. Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The framework of formally recognized free competition remains, but the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.”

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Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter One
Source: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: Full Text of 1916 Edition