Top 100 Lenin's Quotes
#1. On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin's remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.
Ellen Willis
#3. Lenin's Personal life was extraordinarily dull. He dressed and lived like a middle-aged provincial clerk, with precisely fixed hours for meals, sleep, work and leisure. He liked everything to be neat and orderly.
Orlando Figes
#4. Utterly absorbing ... If you did not have the opportunity to witness the Soviet empire in its death throes, Lenin's Tomb will take you there.
Jack F. Matlock Jr.
#5. I absolutely fell in love with Moscow. It's one of those places where you can't help but trip over history at every turn. It's a city of enormous contradictions. Within a few yards of Lenin's Tomb is some of the most expensive shopping in the world.
Daniel Silva
#6. No artist has painted
A true portrait of Lenin
Ages to come will complete
Lenin's unfinished portrait.
Did Poletaev understand the tragic implication of his lines about Lenin? (pg179)
Vasily Grossman
#7. Stalin's hatred for the Old Bolsheviks who opposed him was also a hatred for those aspects of Lenin's character that contradicted what was most essential in Lenin.
Vasily Grossman
#8. Evolution was Vladimir Ilich Lenin's problem. Lenin lead the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and took over Russia. He killed the Zar [ sic ] and his family in cold blood. There would not be communism in Russia today if had not been for Charles Darwin's book on evolution.
Kent Hovind
#9. Why is Earth Day, today, also Lenin's birthday? Coincidence? Or does it signal the true intent of the national and worldwide environmental movement?
Alan Caruba
#10. Lenin's ideal was to build a nation's production effort according to the model of the post office.
Ludwig Von Mises
#12. The feminine section of the proletarian army is of particularly great significance... the success of a revolution depends on the extent to which women take part in it.
Vladimir Lenin
#13. It is necessary - secretly and urgently to prepare the terror.
Vladimir Lenin
#15. Lenin in a top hat and frock coat would be a far greater anomaly than the Grand Lama of Thibet or a Zulu chief in that costume.
Wyndham Lewis
#17. 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
#18. You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.
Vladimir Lenin
#19. 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.
Vladimir Lenin
#20. This is what historians usually do, quibble about cause and effect when the point is, there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world. Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, for instance. Bismark. Lenin.
Orson Scott Card
#21. The political form of a society wherein the proletariat is victorious in overthrowing the bourgeoisie will be a democratic republic.
Vladimir Lenin
#22. One man with a gun can control a hundred without one.
Vladimir Lenin
#23. 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.
Vladimir Lenin
#24. History causes the military problem to become the essence of the political problem.
Vladimir Lenin
#25. If you live on a farm, there is definite peer pressure to grow something.
Janaki Lenin
#26. The statues of Lenin and Stalin are down, but the fight against their ghosts seems harder.
Octavian Paler
#27. Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.
Vladimir Lenin
#28. The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.
Vladimir Lenin
#29. Capitalists will sell us the rope we will hang them with.
Vladimir Lenin
#30. 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.
Vladimir Lenin
#31. Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.
Winston Churchill
#32. 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
#33. I'm getting a little tired of politicians trying to prove how 'moderate' and 'centrist' they are by taking more of my money and freedom. Where's this center - somewhere between Lenin and Stalin?
Ann Coulter
#34. No one has the right to lead other people like sheep. That's something even Lenin failed to understand. The purpose of a revolution is to free people. But Lenin just said: In the past you were led badly, I'm going to lead you well.
Vasily Grossman
#35. 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]
Vladimir Lenin
#36. Under Lenin the Soviet Union was like a religious revival, under Stalin like a prison, under Khrushchev like a circus, and under Brezhnev like the U.S. Post Office.
Jimmy Carter
#37. I am bound to accord you, in the name of free speech, the full right to shout, lie and write to your heart's content. But you are bound to grant me, in the name of freedom of association, the right to enter into, or withdraw from, association with people advocating this or that view.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
#38. How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
Ronald Reagan
#39. If it's not one god it's another. Allah or oil. Jesus or Jewels. Lenin or lust.
Victor Robert Lee
#40. I think I must be the only British actor who's played both Stalin and Trotsky. I need to play Lenin so I can make it a triptych.
Brian Cox
#41. If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.
(Speech in Rome on 20 January, 1927, praising Mussolini)
Winston S. Churchill
#42. 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
#43. When I see hipsters wearing Mao hats or Lenin T-shirts, I'm grateful. It's like truth-in-labeling. For now I know you are: Woefully ignorant, morally stunted, purposively asinine, or all three.
Jonah Goldberg
#44. I consider him [i.e Stalin] one of the greatest persons in the history of mankind. In the history of Russia he was, in my opinion, even greater than Lenin. Until Stalin's death I was anti-Stalinist, but I always regarded him as a brilliant personality.
Alexander Zinoviev
#45. Russians are too kind, they lack the ability to apply determined methods of revolutionary terror.
Vladimir Lenin
#46. Lenin said that people vote with their feet. Well, that's what's happening. They either go, or they don't go. It's all politics. It's all demographics.
Warren Beatty
#47. I know him by another name. His real one is Slem, not uncommon for men of his generation. It stands for Stalin Lenin Engels Marx. He's always making up new names for himself
wouldn't you?
Victor Robert Lee
#48. Man's consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.
Vladimir Lenin
#49. Truth is the most precious thing. That's why we should ration it.
Vladimir Lenin
#50. Marxism will be able to do anything. Or why is Lenin lying whole in Moscow? He's waiting for science - he wants to be revived.
Andrei Platonov
#51. The most important thing when ill is to never lose heart.
Vladimir Lenin
#52. For any truth, if overdone ... if exaggerated, or if carried beyond the limits of its applicability, can be reduced to absurdity.
Vladimir Lenin
#53. The peasants of all lands recognize power and they salute it, whether it's good or evil.
Andrei Codrescu
#54. 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
#56. 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
#57. My father was convinced, I think rightly, that if he stayed in Russia, he would have trouble with Lenin.
Leonid Hurwicz
#58. An end to wars, peace among the nations, the cessation of pillaging and violence - such is our ideal, but only bourgeois sophists can seduce the masses with this ideal, if the latter is divorced from a direct and immediate call for revolutionary action.
Vladimir Lenin
#59. I can't listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
#60. People always have been and they always will be stupid victims of deceit and self-deception in politics.
Vladimir Lenin
#61. 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
#62. Marx made theory ... Lenin applied it with his sense of large-scale social organization ... And Henry Ford made the work of the socialist state possible.
Diego Rivera
#63. Stealing from capitalism is not like stealing out of our own pockets. Marx and Lenin have taught us that anything is ethical, so long as it is in the interest of the proletarian class and its world revolution.
Nicolae Ceausescu
#64. The German leaders, said Winston Churchill, turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.
Robert K. Massie
#66. Lenin, Stalin, and Rakosi recognized that a renewed and purified Christianity was the only force that could move the masses as powerfully as the Marxist ideal could. They attacked it as the enemy that it was and is.
Charles Colson
#67. I believe, as Lenin said, that this revolutionary chaos may yet crystallize into new forms of life.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#68. Usually, after a disagreement, they suggested i read this or that, often Marx, Lenin, or Engels. I preferred Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che, or Fidel, but i ended up having to get into Marx and Lenin just to understand a lot of the speeches and stuff Huey Newton was putting out.
Assata Shakur
#69. Any army which does not train to use all the weapons, all the means and methods of warfare that the enemy possesses, or may possess, is behaving in an unwise or even criminal manner. This applies to politics even more than it does to the art of war.
Vladimir Lenin
#70. Human reason has discovered many amazing things in nature and will discover still more, and will thereby increase its power over nature.
Vladimir Lenin
#71. You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw
Vladimir Lenin
#72. If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.
Mikhail Bakunin
#74. When there is state there can be no freedom, but when there is freedom there will be no state.
Vladimir Lenin
#75. War cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished.
Vladimir Lenin
#76. Capitalists can buy themselves out of any crisis, so long as they make the workers pay
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
#77. One would like to stroke and caress human beings, but one dares not do so, because they bite.
Vladimir Lenin
#79. Show me who your friends are, and I will tell you what you are.
Vladimir Lenin
#80. You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action.
Vladimir Lenin
#81. For the first time the peasant has seen real freedom - freedom to eat his bread, freedom from starvation.
Vladimir Lenin
#82. 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
#83. Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.
Michael Johns
#84. There was an old bastard named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
That's a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That old bastard Stalin did ten in.
Robert Conquest
#85. 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.
Vladimir Lenin
#86. Face the truth squarely. In politics that is always the best and the only correct attitude.
Vladimir Lenin
#87. Only an armed people can be the real bulwark of popular liberty.
Vladimir Lenin
#88. The constitution of Soviet Russia must insure equal rights for all citizens regardless of sex, creed, race, or nationality.
Vladimir Lenin
#89. Lenin, the greatest man of action in our century and at the same time the most selfless.
Vladimir Lenin
#90. It is at moments of need that one learns who one's friends are. Defeated armies learn their lesson.
Vladimir Lenin
#91. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
#92. When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward - or go back. He who now talks about the 'freedom of the press' goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.
Vladimir Lenin
#95. Anyone who has ever tried to share pizza with roommates knows that Communism cannot ever work. If Lenin and Marx had just shared an apartment, perhaps a hundred million lives might have been spared and put to productive use making sneakers and office furniture.
Daniel Suarez
#96. I'm the most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne. And they're all dead ...
Mickey Spillane
#97. For the complete extinction of the state, complete Communism is necessary.
Vladimir Lenin
#98. The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.
Vladimir Lenin
#99. So you, too, like fruitcake? (RW on meeting Lenin in Zurich during World War I.)
Robert Walser
#100. It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution - real girl's talk.
Nina Simone
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