Top 100 Vladimir Lenin Quotes
#1. You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw
Vladimir Lenin
#2. The soundest strategy in war is to postpone operations until the moral disintegration of the enemy renders the delivery of the mortal blow both possible and easy.
Vladimir Lenin
#3. One must not count in thousands, like the propagandist belonging to a small group that has not yet given leadership to the masses; in these circumstances one must count in millions and tens of millions.
Vladimir Lenin
#5. Victory will belong only to those who have faith in the people, those who are immersed in the life-giving spring of popular creativity.
Vladimir Lenin
#6. For the first time the peasant has seen real freedom - freedom to eat his bread, freedom from starvation.
Vladimir Lenin
#7. One man with a gun can control a hundred without one.
Vladimir Lenin
#8. A political leader who desires to be useful to the revolutionary proletariat must be able to distinguish concrete cases of compromises that are inexcusable and are an expression of opportunism and treachery.
Vladimir Lenin
#9. Capitalists will sell us the rope we will hang them with.
Vladimir Lenin
#10. It is necessary - secretly and urgently to prepare the terror.
Vladimir Lenin
#11. Ideological talk and phrase mongering about political liberties should be disposed with; all that is just mere chatter and phrase mongering. We should get away from those phrases.
Vladimir Lenin
#12. You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.
Vladimir Lenin
#13. Russians are too kind, they lack the ability to apply determined methods of revolutionary terror.
Vladimir Lenin
#15. There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.
Vladimir Lenin
#16. The most important thing when ill is to never lose heart.
Vladimir Lenin
#17. Autocracy cannot do without its twin agents: a hangman and a priest, the first to suppress popular resistance by force, the second to sweeten and embellish the lot of the oppressed with empty promises of a heavenly kingdom.
Vladimir Lenin
#18. Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.
Vladimir Lenin
#19. We shall not bind ourselves by treaties. We shall not allow ourselves to be entangled by treaties. We reject all clauses on plunder and violence, but we shall welcome all clauses containing provisions for good-neighbourly relations and all economic agreements; we cannot reject these.
Vladimir Lenin
#20. All extremes 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.
Vladimir Lenin
#21. You must have your heart on fire and your brain on ice.
Vladimir Lenin
#22. Thus, the twentieth century marks the turning-point from the old capitalism to the new, from the domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital.
Vladimir Lenin
#23. The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently; they are more original, more peculiar, more varied than anyone could have expected.
Vladimir Lenin
#24. If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.
Vladimir Lenin
#25. The only one who doesn't make mistakes is the one who doesn't do anything.
Vladimir Lenin
#27. Materialism is the recognition of "objects in themselves", or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies of images of those objects.
Vladimir Lenin
#28. Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state.
Vladimir Lenin
#29. To accept anything on trust, to preclude critical application and development, is a grievous sin.
Vladimir Lenin
#30. All countries will inevitably have to do what Russia has done.
Vladimir Lenin
#31. One of the chief symptoms of every revolution is the sharp and sudden increase in the number of ordinary people who take an active, independent and forceful interest in politics.
Vladimir Lenin
#32. Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.
Vladimir Lenin
#33. Man's consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.
Vladimir Lenin
#34. International unity of the workers is more important than the national.
Vladimir Lenin
#35. The entire trend of development is towards abolition of coercive domination of one part of society over another.
Vladimir Lenin
#36. Behind the October Revolution there are more influential personalities than the thinkers and executors of Marxism.
Vladimir Lenin
#37. Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.
Vladimir Lenin
#38. 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.
Vladimir Lenin
#39. Behind the epistemological scholasticism of empirio-criticism one must not fail to see the struggle of parties in philosophy, a struggle which in the last analysis reflects the tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society.
Vladimir Lenin
#43. 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.
Vladimir Lenin
#44. False rhetoric and false boastfulness spell moral ruin and lead unfailingly to political extinction.
Vladimir Lenin
#45. 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.
Vladimir Lenin
#46. No revolution is worth anything unless it can defend itself.
Vladimir Lenin
#47. Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.
Vladimir Lenin
#48. In the last analysis, productivity of labour is the most important, the principal thing for the victory of the new social system.
Vladimir Lenin
#49. I don't care what becomes of Russia. To hell with it. All this is only the road to a World Revolution.
Vladimir Lenin
#51. I must say that the tasks of the youth in general, and of the Young Communist Leagues and all other organisations in particular, might be summed up in a single word: learn.
Vladimir Lenin
#52. The true leader must submerge himself in the fountain of the people.
Vladimir Lenin
#53. Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people.
Vladimir Lenin
#54. Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.
Vladimir Lenin
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. The bourgeoisie is many times stronger than we. To give it the weapon of freedom of the press is to ease the enemy's cause, to help the class enemy. We do not desire to end in suicide, so we will not do this.
Vladimir Lenin
#58. Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up.
Vladimir Lenin
#59. The Bolsheviks could not have retained power for two and a half months, let alone two and a half years, without the most rigorous and truly iron discipline in our Party.
Vladimir Lenin
#61. Socialists cannot achieve their great aim without fighting against all oppression of nations.
Vladimir Lenin
#62. People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.
Vladimir Lenin
#63. Only by abolishing private property in land and building cheap and hygienic dwellings can the housing problem be solved.
Vladimir Lenin
#64. Honesty in politics is the result of strength; hypocrisy is the result of weakness.
Vladimir Lenin
#65. 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.
Vladimir Lenin
#66. We Social-Democrats always stand for democracy, not "in the name of capitalism," but in the name of clearing the path for our movement, which clearing is impossible without the development of capitalism.
Vladimir Lenin
#67. Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions.
Vladimir Lenin
#68. When it comes to hang the capitalists they will compete with each other to sell us the rope at a lower price.
Vladimir Lenin
#69. 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
#70. Human thought by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths.
Vladimir Lenin
#71. A country of inveterate, backwoods, thick-headed, egotistic philistines
Vladimir Lenin
#72. 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
#73. Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich
that is the democracy of capitalist society.
Vladimir Lenin
#74. Communists have become bureaucrats. If anything will destroy us, it is this.
Vladimir Lenin
#76. The most important thing in illness is never to lose heart.
Vladimir Lenin
#78. Act with the greatest determination and on the offensive. The defensive is the death of every armed rising.
Vladimir Lenin
#79. To picture world history as advancing smoothly and steadily without sometimes taking gigantic strides backward is undialectical, unscientific and theoretically wrong.
Vladimir Lenin
#80. We must hate - hatred is the basis of communism. Children must be taught to hate their parents if they are not communists.
Vladimir Lenin
#81. But democracy is by no means a limit one may not overstep; it is only one of the stages in the course of development from feudalism to capitalism, and from capitalism to Communism.
Vladimir Lenin
#82. No Marxist can deny that the interests of socialism are higher than the interests of the right of nations to self-determination.
Vladimir Lenin
#83. Federal Switzerlandization would be a huge step backwards for Germany. Two
Vladimir Lenin
#84. Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
Vladimir Lenin
#85. The most important thing is to know how to awaken in the still undeveloped masses an intelligent attitude towards religious questions and an intelligent criticism of religions.
Vladimir Lenin
#86. No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.
Vladimir Lenin
#88. It is in prison ... that one becomes a real revolutionary.
Vladimir Lenin
#89. A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution.
Vladimir Lenin
#90. We must follow the rule: Better fewer, but better. We must follow the rule: Better get good human material in two or even three years than work in haste without hope of getting any at all.
Vladimir Lenin
#92. One cannot live in society and be free from society.
Vladimir Lenin
#93. A party is the vanguard of a class, and its duty is to lead the masses and not merely to reflect the average political level of the masses.
Vladimir Lenin
#94. Unity must be won, and only the workers, the class-conscious workers themselves can win it - by stubborn and persistent effort.
Vladimir Lenin
#95. Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed.
Vladimir Lenin
#96. 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.
Vladimir Lenin
#97. If democracy, in essence, means the abolition of class domination, then why should not a socialist minister charm the whole bourgeois world by orations on class collaboration?
Vladimir Lenin
#98. If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years.
Vladimir Lenin
#99. 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
#100. Don't be afraid to admit defeat. Learn from defeat. Do over again more thoroughly, more carefully, and more systematically what you have done badly.
Vladimir Lenin
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
