Quotes About Leninism

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.

Such was classical Marxism's prospectus for the post-revolutionary future. Leninist Marxism's innovation was to interpose—for a backward country like Russia—a whole historical epoch between the proletarian revolution and the advent of socialism.

His political writings around the turn of the century reflect the emergence of Leninism (a word he himself never used) as an amalgam of the Russian revolutionary heritage and Marxism. One of his themes was the paramount importance of the practical side of the movement—program, organization, and tactics.

classical Marxism proclaimed the imminence of world proletarian revolution, Leninism (or "Marxism-Leninism," as it became known in the Soviet Union after Lenin's death) originated in the proposition that there is no proletarian revolution except through the party.

Leninism was in part a revival of Russian Jacobinism within Marxism.

This metaphorical depiction of the Soviet situation as a great wrestling match of opposing classes was at once a manifesto of Stalin's Leninism and a clear revelation of his lifelong need to "beat" in the twofold sense of "strike" and "be victorious.

What "complete victory" really meant in Leninist thinking, it now transpired, was not the complete building of socialism in the USSR; it was the safety of Soviet socialism from external danger, from military intervention by the hostile capitalist encirclement.

I am proud that I have devoted all my life to the struggle for the triumph of Leninism.

My parents believed in the ideology of the Left. And being influenced by Marxism and Leninism theories, they chose Marlena as my second name.

Lenin taught us that every party member should be a Chekist, that is, should observe and denounce. . . . If we suffer from anything, it is not denunciations but non-denunciations.

The fact that the most perfect education in Marxism and Leninism was no guide whatsoever for political behavior—that, on the contrary, one could follow the party line only if one repeated each morning what Stalin had announced the night before—naturally resulted in the same state of mind, the same concentrated obedience, undivided by any attempt to understand what one was doing, that Himmler's ingenious watchword for his SS-men expressed: My honor is my loyalty.

Lenin and Stalin created the idiosyncratic Soviet system in the image of their ruthless little circle of conspirators before the Revolution. Indeed much of the tragedy of Leninism-Stalinism is comprehensible only if one realizes that the Bolsheviks continued to behave in the same clandestine style whether they formed the government of the world's greatest empire in the Kremlin or an obscure little cabal in the backroom of a Tiflis tavern.

This was the big trump card of Marxist-Leninist theory, the idea that people in the present were never more important than the goal, the plan, or the future—some utopian land that everybody would occupy once "purification" had rid it of the bourgeoisie.

Leninism is Marxism of the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution. To be more exact, Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general, the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular.

The ideal type of the Communist is a man in whom all individual, emotional, and unconscious elements have been reduced to a minimum and subjected to the control of an iron will, informed by a supple intellect. That intellect is totally at the service of a single and compelling idea, made incarnate in the Communist Party: the concept of History as an inexorable god whose ways are revealed 'scientifically' through the doctrine and method of Marxism-Leninism.

The Russian Revolution mobilized a popular passion across the world based on Marxism-Leninism, fueled by messianic zeal. It was, perhaps, after the three Abrahamic religions, the greatest millenarian rapture of human history.

After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism

Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite - the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite.

Leninism raised political opportunism to the dignity of a theory.

Many observers, including the present author, believe that the Soviet system as it developed under Stalin was a continuation of Leninism, and that the state founded on Lenin's political and ideological principles could only have maintained itself in a Stalinist form; such critics hold, moreover, that 'Stalinism' in the narrow sense, i.e. the system that prevailed until 1953, has not been affected in any essential way by the changes of the post-Stalinist era.

Around 1967 I began backing away from dogmatic Leninism, not so much because I thought it was false, I just decided there was nothing utopian about it.

Science fiction has traditionally been economically naive, with a strong libertarian streak, which I think is like a crude Leninism. That's attractive because it could be used to explain everything, and if only we lived by its tenets, everything would be perfect.

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)

There are plenty of Marxist-Leninist textbooks about taking power; but there are none about giving it up.