Quotes About Lenin

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

There was more than a little truth in Trotsky's angry accusation of April 1912, after he had suffered the theft of the title of his journal [ Pravda ], that Lenin nourished himself on discord and chaos. But so did all revolutionary politicians, for revolutionary changes issue from profound crises. The bloody trenches of World War I created an enormous new revolutionary constituency, and only those leaders who knew how to exploit it would be prepared for the struggles that lay ahead.

Lenin had been a risk-taker. Trotsky had been one, too, until Stalin had made him the Bill Gates of the Soviet Union, the excoriated crypto-reactionary.

This scenario of capitalism in its final stage consuming itself in an orgy of imperialist destruction is one of the hallmarks of Lenin's political thinking.

Russia is now very far from being a communist country, but when I walked around Moscow, I kept glimpsing these haunting images. There were statues of Lenin and some neon signs of the hammer and sickle. I remembered myself then as a little girl, living under that oppression.

During the Vietnam War, Sontag went off to Hanoi as one of those people Lenin called "useful idiots"—that is, people who could be expected to defend Communism without any interest in investigating the brutality behind it.

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.

To regard the economic process of a society as the essence of the bio-social process of the human animal's society is the same as equating the piece of ground and the house with the rearing of children, or of equating hygiene and work with dancing and music. But it was precisely this purely economic view of life (a view that Lenin had strongly opposed even in his time) that forced the Soviet Union to regress to an authoritarian form.

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.

The corruption at the heart of Communist ideology lay in the means. Social justice, greater freedom and equality, an end to exploitation and alienation are noble, humane ends. What compromised them fatally was the inhuman methods employed to achieve them. This was as true of Lenin and Trotsky as of Stalin.

Peking followed Lenin's dictum that 'promises, like piecrusts, are meant to be broken'.

Lenin found music depressing. Stalin thought he understood and appreciated music. Khrushchev despised music. Which is the worst for a composer?

Lenin g?sea muzica deprimant?. Stalin credea c? înÈ›elege È™i apreciaz? muzica. HruÈ™ciov dispreÈ›uia muzica. Ce e mai r?u pentru un compozitor?

But Lenin founded a very unorthodox Marxist party, if indeed it should be called Marxist at all. Lenin learned to be an atheist, a revolutionary, and a socialist from other native Russian revolutionaries, no from Marx. He picked up the doctrine of dialectical materialism from the Russian revolutionary N.G. Chernyshevskii, not from Marx. An observation by Francis B. Randall

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!

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?

People always have been and they always will be stupid victims of deceit and self-deception in politics.

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.

Béla Kun, a disciple of Lenin, created the first version of a Communist Hungary in 1919

It was necessary to invent history in order to invent the future. The sense of necessity in Cromwell and Lenin (and even in Jefferson) springs from an obsession with time, change, an obsession with cause and effect that starts to make the effect seem like the cause of its own cause. The future is the cause of the past, and we play antiquarian games to reassure ourselves that the past is past and different so that we can believe that the future will be different too.

The government is tottering. We must deal it the death blow an any cost. To delay action is the same as death.

We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.

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

Lenin's idea of relaxation was to sit down with a foreign-language dictionary for an hour or two.