Quotes About Lenin

#1. I believe, as Lenin said, that this revolutionary chaos may yet crystallize into new forms of life.

Mikhail Gorbachev

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. My father was convinced, I think rightly, that if he stayed in Russia, he would have trouble with Lenin.

Leonid Hurwicz

#7. 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

#8. It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution - real girl's talk.

Nina Simone

#9. So you, too, like fruitcake? (RW on meeting Lenin in Zurich during World War I.)

Robert Walser

#10. I'm the most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne. And they're all dead ...

Mickey Spillane

#11. 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

#12. Lenin's ideal was to build a nation's production effort according to the model of the post office.

Ludwig Von Mises

#13. Lenin, the greatest man of action in our century and at the same time the most selfless.

Vladimir Lenin

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. The statues of Lenin and Stalin are down, but the fight against their ghosts seems harder.

Octavian Paler

#19. He was Lenin in a Lamborghini. He was Gandhi with a gun

Soroosh Shahrivar

#20. 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

#21. I suspect in Lenin's works there's everything, if you search well.

Janusz Korwin-Mikke

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. What drives intellectuals and professors crazy is somebody with a high school diploma who made a fortune in business. They agree with Lenin, who thought success in business was a matter of luck, when in reality it is a matter of genius.

James Cook

#25. Ho Chi Minh successfully accomplished his cause to free his country despite the opposition of France and the United States. This achievement required the efforts of a man that was part Lenin, part Gondi, part Confucius, and all Vietnamese.

Chris Diamond

#26. 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.

#27. An ideal sanctified by the sacrifices of such master spirits as Lenin cannot go in vain, the noble example of their renunciation will be emblazoned for ever and quicken and purify the ideal as time passes.

Mahatma Gandhi

#28. 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

#29. In 1917 European history, in the old sense, came to an end. World history began. It was the year of Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom repudiated the traditional standards of political behaviour. Both preached Utopia, Heaven on Earth. It was the moment of birth for our contemporary world.

A.J.P. Taylor

#30. 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

#31. According to Lenin, socialism and democracy are indivisible ... The essence of perestroika lies in the fact that it unites socialism with democracy and revives the Leninist concept of socialist construction both in theory and in practice. We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy.

Mikhail Gorbachev

#32. The devotion of such titans of spirit as Lenin to an Ideal must bear fruit. The nobility of his selflessness will be an example through centuries to come, and his Ideal will reach perfection.

Mahatma Gandhi

#33. Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.

Kim Il-sung

#34. Like a child in new boots leaping from puddle to puddle, this view sees history as leapfrogging from one bloodbath to the next, from World War One to World War Two to the Cold War, from the Armenian genocide to the Jewish genocide to the Rwandan genocide, from Robespierre to Lenin to Hitler.

Yuval Noah Harari

#35. Theory without practice is pointless, practice without theory is mindless. Lenin

Andrew MacLennan

#36. Lenin sensed that Tukhachevsky was a kindred spirit. He delegated the most responsible jobs to the obscure lieutenant.

Mikhail Tukhachevsky

#37. Whatever else Lenin might have done - and it was difficult to separate the truth from the conservative propaganda - at least, Billy thought, he was serious about educating Russian children. On

Ken Follett

#38. Lenin was always prone to overestimate the physical danger to himself: in this respect he was something of a coward.

Orlando Figes

#39. Nazism did not destroy civil society. Bolshevism did destroy civil society. This is one of the reasons for the "miracle" of German recovery, and for the continuation of Russian vulnerability and failure. Stalin did not destroy civil society. Lenin destroyed civil society.

Martin Amis

#40. 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

#41. Sometimes a scoundrel is useful to our party precisely because he is a scoundrel. V. I. Lenin

Catherine Merridale

#42. It was the Russians that introduced the Chinese to Marxism. Before the October Revolution, the Chinese were not only ignorant of Lenin and Stalin but did not even know of Marx or Engels. The salvos of the October Revolution awoke us to Marxism-Leninism.

Mao Zedong

#43. All the revolutions have happened when a Fidel or Marx or Lenin or whatever, who were intellectuals, were able to get through to the workers. They got a good pocket of people together and the workers seemed to understand that they were in a repressed state.

John Lennon

#44. Everyone starved. Starvation is a potent weapon, and the Bolsheviks are happy to wield it. The cheapest way to get rid of the opposition is to starve them. Lenin did it the expensive way, shooting them, but the Soviets can no longer afford that.

Jane Smiley

#45. We decided it here. Ilyich [Lenin] believed that we shouldn't leave the Whites a live banner to rally around, especially under the present difficult circumstances.

Yakov Sverdlov

#46. While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State. Lenin, "State and Revolution",

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

#47. Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none.

Pyotr Kropotkin

#48. Human dignity is something one need not look for in the world of capitalists. V. I. Lenin

Catherine Merridale

#49. The official ideology [of Poland] is Marxism-Leninism, which no one openly admits to believing. For Marx expressed the German view, and Lenin the Russian one, and the meeting of these particular minds has always spelled Polish ruin.

Norman Davies

#50. How can you make a revolution without firing squads?' Lenin asked. 'If we can't shoot a White Guard saboteur, what sort of great revolution is it? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush.

Niall Ferguson

#51. Hitler produced a local "lab experiment"; he provided me with an ideology in the same way that Marx provided one for Lenin. My task is to turn this ideology into a world movement.

George Lincoln Rockwell

#52. I would trade all the advantages of humanity to be a fly on the wall when Franklin and Jefferson discussed liberty, Lenin and Trotsky revolution, Newton and Halley the shape of the universe, or when Darwin entertained Huxley and Lyell at Down.

Stephen Jay Gould

#53. I am a conservative. Quite possibly I am on the losing side; often I think so. Yet, out of a curious perversity I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin.

Russell Kirk

#54. 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

#55. Their souls were contagious ... Bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires: that was what Lenin called them.

Robert Harris

#56. Lenin only believes in the revolution and in the virtue of expediency.'One must be prepared for every sacrifice, to use, if necessary, every stratagem, ruse, illegal method, to be determined to conceal the truth, for the sole purpose of accomplishing, despite everything, the communist task'.

Albert Camus

#57. Lenin, the greatest theorist of them all, did not know what he was going to do after he had got the power.

Garet Garrett

#58. Lenin in 1921 observed very presciently that motion pictures were the most powerful tool ever invented to shape the way we thought. He was right. Political films can be successful.

Charlton Heston

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. I want Chinese history to remember me as Carnegie is remembered. I want Chinese people to remember me as they remember Marx and Lenin.

Chen Guangbiao

#62. 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

#63. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao slaughtered even more tens of millions in the name of equality than Hitler murdered in the name of inequality.

Steve Sailer

#64. The little dictator who went to Moscow in his green fatigues to receive a bear hug did not forsake the doctrine of Lenin when he returned to the West and appeared in a two-piece suit. (On Daniel Ortega Saavedra)

Ronald Reagan

#65. 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

#66. The ultimate goal of the whole policy of peaceful co-existence was to make progress on the basic goal laid down by Lenin of a world largely composed of socialist, communist states, in which the Soviet Union would be the prime mover.

Paul Nitze

#67. If kids can forget their own mothers but still have a sense of comrade Lenin, then Soviet power really is here to stay!

Andrei Platonov

#68. There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.

Ludwig Von Mises

#69. Intellectuals and celebrities venerated monsters like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, & Ho Chi Minh. The New Left of the 1960s didn't have a change of heart, just a change of icons from Stalin to third world tyrants. The homicidal and sadistic Che Guevara is still held up as a hero ...

Jamie Glazov

#70. Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.

Isaiah Berlin

#71. A socialist is someone who has read Lenin and Marx. An anti-socialist is someone who understands Lenin and Marx.

Ronald Reagan

#72. Others loved themselves, money, theories, power: Lenin loved his fellow men ... Lenin was God, as Christ was God, because God is Love and Christ and Lenin were all Love!

Isadora Duncan

#73. Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.

A.J.P. Taylor

#74. 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

#75. In capitalist America economic repression of the masses is institutionalised to a point which not even Lenin could have foreseen . . . "The

John Le Carre

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. In effect, according to Lenin, socialism and democracy are indivisible. By gaining democratic freedoms the working masses come to power.

Mikhail Gorbachev

#79. They looked cheerful in the photograph, Lenin and his wife. As though they had a new refrigerator in their drawing room, and a down payment on a DDA flat.

Arundhati Roy

#80. It was not Marxism that made Lenin a revolutionary but Lenin who made Marxism revolutionary.

Orlando Figes

#81. There would be no Lenin without Rasputin.

Robert K. Massie

#82. The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class.

Ernest Mandel

#83. Killing the private property-that was the center of the Marxist economy and Marxist ideology. That was the center of the Lenin ideology.

Anatoly Chubais

#84. Since Lenin died, every Soviet leader had been a liar. They had all glossed over what was wrong and declined to acknowledge reality. The most striking characteristic of Soviet leadership for the last sixty-five year was the refusal to face facts.(1075)

Ken Follett

#85. It is surely indisputable that no single leader in the twentieth century exerted as great an influence on the course of world history as Lenin.

Dmitri Volkogonov

#86. 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

#87. The elimination of force at all costs is Utopian and the new movement which has arisen in the country and of whose dawn we have given a warning is inspired by the ideals which Guru Gobind Singh and Shivaji, Kamal Pasha and Reza Khan, Washington and Garibaldi, Lafayette and Lenin preached.

Bhagat Singh

#88. If it's not one god it's another. Allah or oil. Jesus or Jewels. Lenin or lust.

Victor Robert Lee

#89. 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

#90. Trotsky was essentially a Western mind. Lenin was a Russian, and unlike most other revolutionary exiles, wherever he went he was a Russian.

Whittaker Chambers

#91. 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

#92. I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me.

George Jackson

#93. If you have a disease of the old society, take a dose of Lenin as medication.

Pol Pot

#94. Your leaders must know powerful magic. Yes, said one of the women. The magic is called Marx, Stalin, Lenin and Class Dialectics. It didn't sound like very powerful magic to me.

David Mitchell

#95. Do you honestly think Lenin is any different from J.P. Morgan? That you, if you were given absolute power, would behave any differently? Do you know the primary difference between men and gods? ... Gods don't think they can become men.

Dennis Lehane

#96. Like Lenin Comrade Stalin is a leader of a higher type. He is a mountain eagle, without fear in the fight, who boldly leads the bolshevik party on unexplored roads toward the total victory of Communism.

Anastas Mikoyan

#97. The whole history of my life, and in essence the whole history of the working class consists of this: that we have lived and fought under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin.

Mikhail Kalinin

#98. We are indebted to Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin for giving us a weapon. The weapon is not a machine-gun, but Marxism-Leninism.

Mao Zedong

#99. The Russians are turning east to the Chinese - to the Europeans' surprise. It always seemed to me that the relationship between Russia and China would shift from being based in Marx and Lenin to being based in oil and gas.

Daniel Yergin

#100. 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