Vladimir Lenin Quotes

Why should freedom of speech and freedom of press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?

Three keys to success: read, read, read.

Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.

The goal of socialism is communism.

We want to achieve a new and better order of society: in this new and better society there must be neither rich nor poor; all will have to work. Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people. This new and better society is called socialist society.

When it comes to hang the capitalists they will compete with each other to sell us the rope at a lower price.

You must have your heart on fire and your brain on ice.

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

Fascism is capitalism in decay.

We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.

The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

Learning is never done without errors and defeat.

The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

The only one who doesn't make mistakes is the one who doesn't do anything.

One man with a gun can control 100 without one.

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them in parliament.

It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse, and howl than to attempt to relate, to explain.

We are not shooting enough professors.

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.

Germany will militarize herself out of existence, England will expand herself out of existence, and America will spend herself out of existence.

Trust is good, but control is better.

It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed.

Only an armed people can be the real bulwark of popular liberty.

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.

You must act with all energy. Mass searches. Execution for concealing arms.

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich -- that is the democracy of capitalist society.

Give me a child for the first 5 years of his life and he will be mine forever.

Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.

Honesty in politics is the result of strength; hypocrisy is the result of weakness.

America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism.

We must not depict socialism as if socialists will bring it to us on a plate all nicely dressed. That will never happen. Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence. When violence is exercised by the working people, by the mass of exploited against the exploiters -- then we are for it!

One of the chief symptoms of every revolution is the sharp and sudden increase in the number of ordinary people who take an active, independent and forceful interest in politics.

You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.

No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies!

Free speech is a bourgeois prejudice.

Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.

Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations -- all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.

Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.

But I can't listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid, nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell.

There can be nothing more abominable than religion.

By destroying the peasant economy and driving the peasant from the country to the town, the famine creates a proletariat... Furthermore the famine can and should be a progressive factor not only economically. It will force the peasant to reflect on the bases of the capitalist system, demolish faith in the tsar and tsarism, and consequently in due course make the victory of the revolution easier... Psychologically all this talk about feeding the starving and so on essentially reflects the usual sugary sentimentality of our intelligentsia.

Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.

Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.

Capitalists will sell us the rope we will hang them with.

I am a bad, wicked man, but I am practicing moral self-purification; I don't eat meat any more, I now eat rice cutlets.

I don't care what becomes of Russia. To hell with it. All this is only the road to a World Revolution.