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Think (About It)

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Russian: Влади́мир Ильи́ч Ульянов) (22 April 1870 (10 April (O.S.)) - 21 January 1924) was a Russian revolutionary, the leader of the Bolshevik party, the first Premier of the Soviet Union, and the main theorist of Leninism.

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  • 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.

  • All extremes, of course, are bad. All that is good and useful, if carried to extremes, may become — and beyond a certain limit is bound to become — bad and injurious. Disorderly, unorganised and petty terrorist acts may, if carried to extremes, only scatter and squander our forces. That is a fact, which, of course, should not be forgotten. On the other hand, under no circumstances should it be forgotten that a slogan calling for an uprising has already been issued, that the uprising has already begun. To launch attacks under favourable circumstances is not only every revolutionary’s right, but his plain duty. The killing of spies, policemen, gendarmes, the blowing up of police stations, the liberation of prisoners, the seizure of government funds for the needs of the uprising — such operations are already being carried out wherever insurrection is rife, in Poland and in the Caucasus, and every detachment of the revolutionary army must be ready to start such operations at a moment’s notice. Each group should remember that if it allows a favourable opportunity for such an operation to slip by today, it will be guilty of unpardonable inactivity, of passivity — and such an offence is the greatest crime a revolutionary can commit at a time of insurrection, the greatest disgrace that can befall anyone who is striving for liberty in deed, and not in word alone.

  • 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.

  • Dictatorship is domination of one part of society over the rest of society, and domination, moreover, that rests directly on coercion. Dictatorship of the proletariat, the only consistently revolutionary class, is necessary to overthrow the bourgeoisie and repel its attempts at counter-revolution. The question of proletarian dictatorship is of such overriding importance that he who denies the need for such dictatorship, or recognises it only in words, cannot he a member of the Social-Democratic Party. However, it cannot be denied that in individual cases, by way of exception, for instance, in some small country after the social revolution has been accomplished in a neighbouring big country, peaceful surrender of power of the bourgeosie is possible, if it is convinced that resistance is hopless and prefers to save its skin. It is much more likely, of course that even in small states socialism will not be acheived without civil war, and for that reason the only programme of international Social-Democracy must be recognition of civil war, though violence is, of course, alien to our ideals.


  • 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.

  • Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence. When violence is exercised by the working people, by the mass of exploited against the exploiters — then we are for it! ... 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...

  • 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.

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


  • 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.

  • The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of another in the endeavour to keep them disunited.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 24

  • 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.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 18

  • International unity of the workers is more important than the national.
    • Lenin Collected Works, Volume 35, pages 246-247

  • We are defenders of the socialist fatherland.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 27, pages 365-381

  • What we prize most is peace and an opportunity to devote all our efforts to restoring our economy.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 32, pages 112-119

  • Disarmament is the ideal of socialism.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 23, p.94-104

  • An end to wars, peace among the nations, the cessation of pillaging and violence-such is our ideal.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Vol. 21, p.293

  • We reject all clauses on plunder and violence, but we shall welcome all clauses containing provisions for good-neighbourly relations.

  • Victory will belong only to those who have faith in the people, those who are immersed in the life-giving spring of popular creativity
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 26, 1972, pp. 285-293

  • We want to achieve a new and better order of society: in this new and better society there must be neither rich nor poor; all will have to work. Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people. This new and better society is called socialist society.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Vol 6, p.366

  • We love our language and our country, and we are doing our very utmost to raise her toiling masses (i.e., nine-tenths of her population) to the level of a democratic and socialist consciousness.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 26, p.107

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

  • The entire trend of development is towards abolition of coercive domination of one part of society over another.
    • Lenin Collected Works, Volume 23, pages 28-76.

  • 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.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 24, pages 38-41.

  • Communism cannot be imposed by force.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 29, pages 141-225

  • Our aim is to achieve a socialist system of society, which, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by eliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will inevitably eliminate the very possibility of war.
    • Lenin Collected Works, Volume 24, pages 398-421.

  • 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.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 24, pages 42-54.

  • Where and when have riots and anarchy been provoked by wise measures? If the government had acted wisely, and if their measures had met the needs of the poor peasants, would there have been unrest among the peasant masses?
  • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 26, Report on Land

  • The proletarian revolution is impossible without the sympathy and support of the overwhelming majority of the working people.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 30, pages 52-62

  • To become a power the class-conscious workers must win the majority to their side.As long as no violence is used against the people there is no other road to power. We are not Blancists, we do not stand for the seizure of power by a minority.
    • Lenin Collected Works, Volume 24, pages 38-41

  • For the first time the peasant has seen real freedom—freedom to eat his bread, freedom from starvation.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 30, pages 107-117

  • No revolution is worth anything unless it can defend itself.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 28, 1974, pages 113-126

  • Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 38, p.85-241

  • The sole ‘property’ of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside the mind.

  • Human thought by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths.

  • 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.

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


  • Materialism is the recognition of ‘objects in themselves’, or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies of images of those objects

  • History is moving in zig-zags and by roundabout ways.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 27, pages 159-63

  • 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.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Vol. 32, p.94

  • Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness—voilà the epistemological roots of idealism.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 38, pp. 357-361


  • It is logical to assert that all matter possesses a property which is essentially akin to sensation, the property of reflection.
    • Lenin Collected Works, Volume 14, pages 17-362.

  • 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.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 18, pages 435-436.

  • 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.!
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Vol. 15, 229

  • 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.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 25, p.381-492

  • We have invited and continue to invite the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to share power with us.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 26, 1972, pp. 304-308

  • Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes!
    • Collected Works, Volume 18, 543-44

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

  • ...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.

  • 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.
    • Source: Collected Works, Volume 28,62-75

  • Do everything to demonstrate, and in the most emphatic manner, our sympathy for the Moslems, their autonomy, independence, etc.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 30, page 494

  • The capture of Simbirsk, my home town, is a wonderful tonic, the best treatment for my wounds. I feel a new lease of life and energy.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 28, 1974, page 98

  • 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.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 18, pages 163-169.

  • 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.
    • Lenin Collected Works, Volume 7, pages 92-103.

  • Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.
    • Lenin Collected Works, Volume 21, pages 158-164.

  • 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.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 28,pages 180-182

  • The natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i.e., he must be a dialectical materialist.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 33, pp. 227-236

  • We have the following of the majority of a class, the vanguard of the revolution, the vanguard of the people, which is capable of carrying the masses with it.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 26, pp. 22-27

  • You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 31

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

  • To be successful, insurrection must rely not upon conspiracy and not upon a party, but upon the advanced class. That is the first point. Insurrection must rely upon a revolutionary upsurge of the people. That is the second point. Insurrection must rely upon that turning-point in the history of the growing revolution when the activity of the advanced ranks of the people is at its height, and when the vacillations in the ranks of the enemy and in the ranks of the weak, half-hearted and irresolute friends of the revolution are strongest. That is the third point. And these three conditions for raising the question of insurrection distinguish Marxism from Blanquism.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 26, 1972, pp. 22-27

  • 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.


  • Socialism, by organising production without class oppression, by ensuring the well-being of all members of the state, gives full play to the “sympathies” of the population, thereby promoting and greatly accelerating the drawing together and fusion of the nations.
    • Lenin Collected Works, Volume 22, pages 320-360.

  • 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.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 31, pages 152-164

  • It is not for nothing that Skaldin in one part of his book quotes Adam Smith: we have seen that both his views and the character of his arguments in many respects repeat the theses of that great ideologist of the progressive bourgeoisie.
    • Lenin᾿s Collected Works, Volume 2, pp. 491-534.

  • 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.


  • Shame on accursed tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 29, p.252-53

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

  • 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!"
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 41, pages 262-266

  • The Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers with the aid of the British Noskes and Scheidemanns.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 31, pages 213-263

  • The bourgeoisie are today evading taxation by bribery and through their connections; we must close all loopholes.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 27, pages 383-387

  • The “democratisation” of the ownership of shares, from which the bourgeois sophists and opportunist so-called “Social-Democrats” expect (or say that they expect) the “democratisation of capital”, the strengthening of the role and significance of small scale production, etc., is, in fact, one of the ways of increasing the power of the financial oligarchy.

  • 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
    • Lenin’s Collected WorksVolume 31, pages 267-269

  • 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.

  • And, indeed, there could not be any other grouping among our students, because they are the most responsive section of the intelligentsia, and the intelligentsia are so called just because they most consciously, most resolutely and most accurately reflect and express the development of class interests and political groupings in society as a whole.
    • Lenin Collected Works, Volume 7, pages 43-56.

  • To carry on a war for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie, a war which is a hundred times more difficult, protracted and complex than the most stubborn of ordinary wars between states, and to renounce in advance any change of tack, or any utilization of a conflict of interests (even if temporary) among one’s enemies, or any conciliation or compromise with possible allies (even if they are temporary, unstable, vacillating, or conditional allies)—is that not ridiculous in the extreme?”

  • One cannot live in society and be free from society
    • Lenin's Collected Works,Volume 10, pages 44-49.

  • To picture world history as advancing smoothly and steadily without sometimes taking gigantic strides backward is undialectical, unscientific and theoretically wrong
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 22, pages 305-319.

  • Modern militarism is the result of capitalism. In both its forms it is the “vital expression” of capitalism—as a military force used by the capitalist states in their external conflicts and as a weapon in the hands of the ruling classes for suppressing every kind of movement, economic and political, of the proletariat.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 15, pages 191-201.

  • 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.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 5, pages 25-30.

  • 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.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 32, pp.504-509

  • Only by abolishing private property in land and building cheap and hygienic dwellings can the housing problem be solved.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 24, p. 455-480

  • 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.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 26, pp. 453-482

  • Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the landowners and that of the capitalists. It is a slave society, since the “free” workers, who all their life work for the capitalists, are “entitled” only to such means of subsistence as are essential for the maintenance of slaves who produce profit, for the safeguarding and perpetuation of capitalist slavery.
    • Lenin Collected Works, Volume 10, pages 83-87.

  • A United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the European capitalists ... but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 21, p 341

  • Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable. Even the bare mention of a citizen’s religion in official documents should unquestionably be eliminated.
    • Lenin Collected Works, Volume 10, pages 83-87.

  • Hundreds of thousands and millions of wage slaves of capital and peasants downtrodden by the serf-owners are going to the slaughter for the dynastic interests of a handful of crowned brigands, for the profits of the bourgeoisie in its drive to plunder foreign lands.
    • Collected Works, Volume 41

  • Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations—such is the national programme that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers.
    • Lenin Collected Works, Volume 20, pages 393-454.

  • Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Vol 9, p29

  • The truth about Kolchak (and his double, Denikin) has now been revealed in full. The shooting of tens of thousands of workers. The shooting even of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The flogging of peasants of entire districts. The public flogging of women. The absolutely unbridled power of the officers, the sons of landowners. Endless looting. Such is the truth about Kolchak and Denikin.
    • Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 29, p.436-455

  • Does not the whole history of socialism, particularly of French socialism, which is so rich in revolutionary striving, show us that when the working people themselves take power in their hands the ruling classes resort to unheard-of crimes and shootings if it is a matter of protecting their money-bags.
    • “Report on the Activities of the Council of People’s Commissars,” Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 459-61

  • The civil war which was started by the Cadet-Kaledin counter-revolutionary revolt against the Soviet authorities, against the workers’ and peasants’ government, has finally brought the class struggle to a head and has destroyed every chance of setting in a formally democratic way the very acute problems with which history has confronted the peoples of Russia, and in the first place her working class and peasants.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 26, 1972, pp. 379-383

  • 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.
    • Lenin Collected Works, Volume 5, pages 347-530.

  • 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.
    • Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 31, pages 438-459

  • Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation.
    The Three Sources and Three Constituent Parts of Marxism (1913)

  • We know that an unskilled labourer or a cook cannot immediately get on with the job of state administration.
    Will the Bolsheviks Retain Government Power? (1917)
    This citation is often misquoted as "every cook must learn to govern the state" or even "every cook can govern the state"

  • The war is relentless: it puts the alternative in a ruthless relief: either to perish, or to catch up with the advanced countries and outdistance them, too, in economic matters.
    The Impending Catastrophe and How to Fight It (1917)

  • 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.
  • Left Wing' Childishness, Lenin, Pravda, May 1918

  • 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.
    • Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 28.

  • From the vulgar bourgeois standpoint the terms of dictatoship 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 understands by dictatorship the annulment of all liberties and guarantees of democracy, arbitrariness of every kind, and every sort of abuse of power, in a dictator's personal interests.
    • Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 31

  • Пока есть государство, нет свободы. Когда будет свобода, не будет государства.
    • While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.
    • State and Revolution (1919)

  • Communism is Soviet government plus the electrification of the whole country.
    • New External and Internal Position and the Problems of the Party (1920)

  • 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.
    • Speech (May 27, 1922)

  • Из всех искусств важнейшим для нас является кино.
    • Translation: Cinema is the most important of all the arts for us.
    • Complete works of V.I.Lenin - 5th Edition - Vol. 44. - p. 579: Conversation with A.V.Lunacharsky

  • "Am sure that the crushing of the Kazan Czechs and whiteguards, as well as of the kulak extortioners supporting them, will be exemplarily ruthless."
    • Telegram to Leon Trotsky (7 September 1918) as translated by Andrew Rothstein; published in Lenin Collected Works, Volume 35, page 359
    • 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.
    • As translated in The Cheka : Lenin’s Political Police (1981) by George Leggett, p. 119,

  • It is obvious that a whiteguard insurrection is being prepared in Nizhni. You must strain every effort, appoint three men will) dictatorial powers (yourself, Markin and one other), organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like.
    • Lenin Collected Works, Volume 35, page 350, 9 August 1918.

  • 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.
    • Lenin Collected Works, Volume 42, pages 94-95

  • When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world.
    • "The Importance of Gold Now and After the Complete Victory of Socialism", Lenin Collected Works, Volume 33, page 113

  • What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy.
    • Reportedly addressed to a delegation of Italian socialists in Moscow after Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922.
    • Domenico Settembrini, cited in Carlos Rangel, Third World Ideology and Western Reality (Transaction, 1986), p. 15.

Attributed

  • The state does not function as desired. The car does not obey. A man is at the wheel and he seems to lead it, but the car does not drive in the desired direction. It moves as another force wishes.
    • Susan George, A Fate Worse than Debt 1988

  • Every cook must learn to rule the State.
    • Florence Becker, Woman's Place (from New International, Vol.2 No.5, August 1935, pp.175-176)

  • 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.
    • Quoted from a "Speech to followers" by Ost-Information (Berlin), No. 81, December 4, 1920.
    • A. L. O. Dennis, The foreign Policies of Soviet Russia (New York, 1924), pp. 154-5.

  • It is true that liberty is precious—so precious that it must be rationed.
    • Attributed. Quoted by Sidney & Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism:A New Civilization? (1936)

  • Ничего не знаю лучше «Apassionata», готов слушать ее каждый день. Изумительная, нечеловеческая музыка. Я всегда с гордостью, может быть, наивной, детской, думаю: вот какие чудеса могут делать люди ... Но часто слушать музыку не могу, действует на нервы, хочется милые глупости говорить и гладить по головкам людей, которые, живя в грязном аду, могут создавать такую красоту. А сегодня гладить по головке никого нельзя — руку откусят, и надобно бить по головкам, бить безжалостно, хотя мы, в идеале, против всякого насилия над людьми. Гм-гм, - должность адски трудная!
    • Translation: I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day. What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps with a childish naiveté, to think that people can work such miracles! ... But I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things, and pat the little heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. These days, one can’t pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. Hence, you have to beat people's little heads, beat mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hm - what a devillishly difficult job!
    • From a personal conversation, quoted by memory by Maxim Gorky in "V.I. Lenin" (1924)

Disputed

  • We did not hesitate to shoot thousands of people, and we shall not hesitate, and we shall save the country.
    • Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders who Built the Soviet Regime (1998) by Dmitri Volkogonov, pp. 72, 73

  • 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."
    • Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders who Built the Soviet Regime (1998) by Dmitri Volkogonov, p. 74 ("Nikola" = St. Nickolas' Day)

Misattributed

  • First, we'll take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia, then we will encircle the United States which will be the last bastion of capitalism. We will not have to attack. It will fall like an overripe fruit into our outstretched hand.
    • Frequently attributed by Ronald Reagan, for examle in "Inside Ronald Reagan" (June 1975) Reason. Debunked in Paul F. Boller and John H. George (1990) They Never Said It. The last two sentences have also been misattributed to Nikita Krushchev.
  • Practice is the criterion of truth
    • This quote is actually from Mao Zedong. See "On Practice"

On Lenin

  • Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.
    • Benito Mussolini. Quoted in "Mussolini in the Making" - Page 326 - by Gaudens Megaro - 1938

  • Max Weber and Vladimir Lenin say, in almost identical words, that with regard to the use of force the state is always a dictatorship.
    Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude
 
Quoternity
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