Vladimir Lenin Quotes - Page 9

Victory will belong only to those who have faith in the people, those who are immersed in the life-giving spring of popular creativity.

Peace, Land, and Bread! All power to the Soviet!

When we say "the state," the state is We, it is we, it is the proletariat, it is the advanced guard of the working class.

All countries will inevitably have to do what Russia has done.

History causes the military problem to become the essence of the political problem.

But suppose, for the sake of argument, free competition, without any sort of monopoly, would develop capitalism trade more rapidly. Is it not a fact that the more rapidly trade and capitalism develop, the greater is the concentration of production and capital which gives rise to monopoly?

The reflection of nature in man's thought must be understood not lifelessly but in the eternal process of movement, the arising of contradictions and their solution.

Socialists cannot achieve their great aim without fighting against all oppression of nations.

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

Our idea is that a state is strong when the people are politically conscious. It is strong when the people know everything, can form an opinion of everything, and do everything consciously.

When a war is waged by two opposing groups of robbers for the sake of deciding who shall have a freer hand to oppress more people, then the question of the origin of the war is of no real economic or political significance.

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

Behind the October Revolution there are more influential personalities than the thinkers and executors of Marxism.

You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action.

It is stupid to tolerate Nikola; all Chekists have to be on alert to shoot anyone who doesn't turn up to work because of Nikola.

All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery.

The Bolsheviks could not have retained power for two and a half months, let alone two and a half years, without the most rigorous and truly iron discipline in our Party.

An end to wars, peace among the nations, the cessation of pillaging and violence - such is our ideal, but only bourgeois sophists can seduce the masses with this ideal, if the latter is divorced from a direct and immediate call for revolutionary action.

The state does not function as we desired. A man is at the wheel and seems to lead it, but the car does not drive in the desired direction. It moves as another force wishes.

Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense.

The natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i.e., he must be a dialectical materialist.

The functionaries of our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted - or rather tend to be corrupted - by the conditions of capitalism and betray a tendency to become bureaucrats, i.e., privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people.

The war is relentless: it puts the alternative in a ruthless relief: either to perish, or to catch up with the advanced countries and outdistance them, too, in economic matters.

Every cook must learn to rule the State.

It is at moments of need that one learns who one's friends are. Defeated armies learn their lesson.