10 Vladimir Lenin Quotes on Ideology

Vladimir Lenin quotes on ideology

7. Communism cannot be imposed by force.

13. Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness-voila the epistemological roots of idealism.

21. To call a fight for the Zionist idea of a Jewish nation, for the federal principle of Party organisation, a 'fight for the equality of the Jews in the world family of the proletariat' is to degrade the struggle from the plane of ideas and principles to that of suspicion, incitement and fanning of historically-evolved prejudices. It glaringly reveals a lack of real ideas and principles as weapons of struggle.

22. Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.

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

35. The Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers with the aid of the British Noskes and Scheidemanns.

40. To carry on a war for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie, a war which is a hundred times more difficult, protracted and complex than the most stubborn of ordinary wars between states, and to renounce in advance any change of tack, or any utilization of a conflict of interests (even if temporary) among one's enemies, or any conciliation or compromise with possible allies (even if they are temporary, unstable, vacillating, or conditional allies)-is that not ridiculous in the extreme?'

52. 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.

56. Terrorists bow to the spontaneity of the passionate indignation of intellectuals, who lack the ability or opportunity to connect the revolutionary struggle and the working-class movement into an integral whole. It is difficult indeed for those who have lost their belief, or who have never believed, that this is possible, to find some outlet for their indignation and revolutionary energy other than terror.

65. Communism is Soviet government plus the electrification of the whole country.