Quotes from Vladimir Lenin

We are witnessing a highly instructive and highly comical spectacle. The bourgeois liberal prostitutes are trying to drape themselves in the toga of revolution.

Peace reigned in Europe, but this was because domination over hundreds of millions of people in the colonies by the European nations was sustained only through constant, incessant, interminable wars, which we Europeans do not regard as wars at all, since all too often they resembled, not wars, but brutal massacres, the wholesale slaughter of unarmed peoples.

The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.

This is so true [...]

It is not surprising that the author is driven to the conclusion that "the French Republic is a financial monarchy"; "it is the complete domination of the financial oligarchy; the latter dominates over the press and the government."[9]

American ethics", which the European professors and well-meaning bourgeois so hypocritically deplore, have, in the age of finance capital, become the ethics of literally every large city in any country.

I had already drawn up the plan for the next, the seventh chapter, on the 'Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917.' But... It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it.

As long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will never be utilised for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalists; it will be used for the purpose of increasing those profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries.

Matter is a philosophicalcategory denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.

I can't listen to music because it makes me want to say sweet, silly things, and pat people on the head… but you have to beat people's heads, beat them mercilessly! … What a devilishly difficult job I have.

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich: this is the democratism of capitalist society.

Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.

Creative activity at the grassroots is the basic factor of the new public life. Let the workers set up workers' control at their factories. Let them supply the villages with manufactures in exchange for grain […] Socialism cannot be decreed from above. Its spirit rejects the mechanical bureaucratic approach: living creative socialism is the product of the masses themselves.

The reason such elementary things have to be explained to the Russian "democrats" is that they are so immersed right up to their ears in the mud of petty-bourgeois ideas that to imagine any but a petty-bourgeois order of things is quite beyond them.

It is important for us to draw literally all working people into the government of the state. It is a task of tremendous difficulty. But socialism cannot be implemented by a minority, by the Party. It can be implemented by tens of millions when they have learned to do it for themselves.

Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means.

In the history of modern socialism this is a phenomenon, that the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement has from national become international.

After the experience both of Europe and Asia, anyone who speaks of non - class politics and of non - class socialism deserves to be simply put in a cage and exhibited alongside of the Australian kangaroo.

Ancak kendine güveni olmayanlar, güvenilmez insanlarla bile olsa geçici ittifaklara girmekten korkar ve hiçbir politik parti bu tür ittifaklar olmadan var olamaz.

We must also note that Engels is most definite in calling universal suffrage an instrument of bourgeois rule. Universal suffrage, he says, obviously summing up the long experience of German Social-Democracy, is "the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state."

that social-chauvinism (socialism in words, chauvinism in deeds)

O Estado é "uma força especial de repressão". Esta notável e profunda definição de Engels é de uma absoluta clareza. Dela resulta que essa força especial de repressão do proletariado pela burguesia, de milhões de trabalhadores por um punhado de ricos, deve ser substituída por uma "força especial de repressão" da burguesia pelo proletariado (a ditadura do proletariado)

Prior to January 22, 1905, the revolutionary party of Russia consisted of a small handful of people, and the reformists of those days, derisively called us a 'sect'. Within a few months, however, the picture completely changed. The hundreds of revolutionary Social Democrats 'suddenly' grew into thousands; the thousands became leaders of between two and three million proletarians.

in view of the extreme complexity of the phenomena of social life it is always possible to select any number of examples or separate data to prove any proposition),