Quotes from Vladimir Lenin

Crises of every kind — economic crises more frequently, but not only these — in their turn increase very considerably the tendency towards concentration and monopoly.

To refuse to work in the reactionary trade unions means leaving the insufficiently developed or backward masses of workers under the influence of the reactionary leaders, the agents of the bourgeoisie, the labor aristocrats, or the "workers who have become completely bourgeois".

If] we were to make "recognition of the dictatorship [of the proletariat]" a condition of trade union membership, we should be committing a folly, we should be damaging our influence over the masses, we should be helping the Mensheviks. For the whole task of the Communists is to be able to convince the backward elements, to work among them, and not to fence themselves off from them…

Under capitalism democratism is restricted, cramped, curtailed, mutilated by all the conditions of wage slavery and of the poverty and misery of the masses. This and this alone is the reason why the office-holders in our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted (or, more precisely, have a tendency to be corrupted) by the conditions of capitalism and betray a tendency to being turned into bureaucrats, i.e. privileged persons cut off from the masses and standing above the masses

we shall move on to a break with these traitors to socialism and shall fight for the complete destruction of the old state machine in order that the armed proletariat itself should become the government.

The distortion and shelving of the question of the relation of the proletarian revolution to the state could not help but play an immense role at a time when states, each with its military apparatus reinforced as a result of imperialist competition, have been turned into military monsters which are exterminating millions of people in order to decide the dispute as to whether England or Germany – this or that centre of finance capital – is to rule the world.

The replacement of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution. The eradication of the proletarian state, i.e. the eradication of the state as such, is impossible except through the process of 'withering away'.

It is not he who makes no mistakes that is intelligent. There are no such men, nor can there be. It is he whose errors are not very grave and who is able to rectify them easily and quickly that is intelligent.

Only the proletariat—by virtue of the economic role it plays in large-scale production—is capable of being the leader of all the working and exploited people, whom the bourgeoisie exploit, oppress and crush, often not less but more than they do the proletarians, but who are incapable of waging an independent struggle for their emancipation.

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.

For the complete extinction of the state, complete Communism is necessary.

Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state.

It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it.

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.

False rhetoric and false boastfulness spell moral ruin and lead unfailingly to political extinction.

When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward--or go back

Without Revolutionary theory, there can be no Revolutionary Movement.

The goal of socialism is communism.