Vladimir Lenin Quotes

Behind the October Revolution there are more influential personalities than the thinkers and executors of Marxism.

Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism.

No revolution is worth anything unless it can defend itself.

Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes.

Our idea is that a state is strong when the people are politically conscious. It is strong when the people know everything, can form an opinion of everything, and do everything consciously.

The entire trend of development is towards abolition of coercive domination of one part of society over another.

For the first time the peasant has seen real freedom - freedom to eat his bread, freedom from starvation.

Three keys to success: read, read, read.

It is necessary to be able to withstand all this, to agree to any and every sacrifice, and even - if need be - to resort to all sorts of stratagems, manoeuvres and illegal methods, to evasion and subterfuges in order to penetrate the trade unions, to remain in them, and to carry on Communist work in them at all costs.

Peace, Land, and Bread! All power to the Soviet!

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.

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.

Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

Honesty in politics is the result of strength; hypocrisy is the result of weakness.

You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.

Sometimes quantity has a quality all its own.

Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.

The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.

Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.

It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed.

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

Perfect definition of atheist dogma. Your mind has been subjected to subtle mental conditioning year after year. Now the atheist lie has become the truth to you. A lie that can be blown away with the real truth. It just takes time to unwind the atheist mental conditioning. The truth is out there. Outside of atheist dogma lies the truth!

To picture world history as advancing smoothly and steadily without sometimes taking gigantic strides backward is undialectical, unscientific and theoretically wrong.

Unity must be won, and only the workers, the class-conscious workers themselves can win it - by stubborn and persistent effort.

The most important thing when ill is to never lose heart.

The suppression of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without violent revolution.

It would be the greatest mistake, certainly, to think that concessions mean peace. Nothing of the kind. Concessions are nothing but a new form of war.

Communists have become bureaucrats. If anything will destroy us, it is this.

Crime is a product of social excess.

Freedom of speech and the press must be complete. But then freedom of association must be complete too.

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'.

One fool can ask more questions in a minute than 12 wise men can answer in an hour.

We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.

Capitalists are no more capable of self-sacrifice than a man is capable of lifting himself up by his own bootstraps.

Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.

All contemporary religions and churches, all and every kind of religious organization, Marxism has always viewed as organs of bourgeois reaction, serving as a defense of exploitation and the doping of the working-classes.

By destroying the peasant economy and driving the peasant from the country to the town, the famine creates a proletariat... Furthermore the famine can and should be a progressive factor not only economically. It will force the peasant to reflect on the bases of the capitalist system, demolish faith in the tsar and tsarism, and consequently in due course make the victory of the revolution easier... Psychologically all this talk about feeding the starving and so on essentially reflects the usual sugary sentimentality of our intelligentsia.

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

Imperialism: The final stage of Capitalism.

The constitution of Soviet Russia must insure equal rights for all citizens regardless of sex, creed, race, or nationality.

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.

All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all.

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.

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.

The most important thing in illness is never to lose heart.

Trust is good, but control is better.