48 Vladimir Lenin Quotes on Politics

Vladimir Lenin quotes on politics

1. Violence is, of course, alien to our ideals.

3. Disarmament is the ideal of socialism.

4. We love our language and our country, and we are doing our very utmost to raise her toiling masses (i.e., nine-tenths of her population) to the level of a democratic and socialist consciousness.

5. The entire trend of development is towards abolition of coercive domination of one part of society over another.

6. Humanity has not yet evolved and we do not as yet know a type of government superior to and better than the Soviets of Workers', Agricultural Labourers', Peasants', and Soldiers' Deputies.

7. Communism cannot be imposed by force.

9. The passing of state power from one class to another is the first, the principal, the basic sign of a revolution, both in the strictly scientific and in the practical political meaning of that term.

17. To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament--this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary- constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.

19. Do everything to demonstrate, and in the most emphatic manner, our sympathy for the Moslems, their autonomy, independence, etc.

20. The real emancipation of the Chinese people from age-long slavery would be impossible without the great, sincerely democratic enthusiasm which is rousing the working masses and making them capable of miracles, and which is evident from every sentence of Sun Yat-sen's platform.

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.

25. We have the following of the majority of a class, the vanguard of the revolution, the vanguard of the people, which is capable of carrying the masses with it.

27. To be successful, insurrection must rely not upon conspiracy and not upon a party, but upon the advanced class. That is the first point. Insurrection must rely upon a revolutionary upsurge of the people. That is the second point. Insurrection must rely upon that turning-point in the history of the growing revolution when the activity of the advanced ranks of the people is at its height, and when the vacillations in the ranks of the enemy and in the ranks of the weak, half-hearted and irresolute friends of the revolution are strongest. That is the third point. And these three conditions for raising the question of insurrection distinguish Marxism from Blanquism.

28. 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.

30. It is not for nothing that Skaldin in one part of his book quotes Adam Smith: we have seen that both his views and the character of his arguments in many respects repeat the theses of that great ideologist of the progressive

32. For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary.

33. Shame on accursed tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.

34. Tsar Nicholas the Bloody, who has dispersed the First and Second Dumas, who has drowned Russia in blood, enslaved Poland and Finland, and is in alliance with out-and-out reactionaries conducting a policy of stifling the Jews and all 'aliens', the tsar whose loyal friends shot down the workers on the Lena and ruined the peasants to the point of starvation all over Russia-that tsar pretends to be the champion of Slav independence and freedom!'

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.

36. The bourgeoisie are today evading taxation by bribery and through their connections; we must close all loopholes.

37. The 'democratisation' of the ownership of shares, from which the bourgeois sophists and opportunist so-called 'Social-Democrats' expect (or say that they expect) the 'democratisation of capital', the strengthening of the role and significance of small scale production, etc., is, in fact, one of the ways of increasing the power of the financial oligarchy.

38. As long as the bourgeois parliament remains a means of duping the workers, and phrases about 'democracy' are used to cover up financial swindling and every kind of bribery (the particularly 'subtle' brand of bribery the bourgeoisie practise with regard to writers, N.P.s, lawyers, and others is nowhere to be seen on so wide a scale as in the bourgeois parliament), we Communists are in duty bound to be in this very institution (which is supposed to express the people's will but actually covers up the deception of the people by the wealthy) to untiringly expose this deception, and expose each and every case of the Renners and Co.'s desertion to the capitalists, against the workers

39. And, indeed, there could not be any other grouping among our students, because they are the most responsive section of the intelligentsia, and the intelligentsia are so called just because they most consciously, most resolutely and most accurately reflect and express the development of class interests and political groupings in society as a whole.

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?'

51. Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations-such is the national programme that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers.

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.

54. The present Government of Finland on coming into power executed in cold blood within a few days' time 16,700 members of the old Socialist Republic, and imprisoned in starvation camps 70,000 more. Meanwhile the total executions in Russia for the year ended November 1, 1918, were officially stated to have been 3,800, including many corrupt Soviet of officials as well as counter-revolutionists. The Finnish Government was infinitely more terroristic than the Russian.

55. The civil war which was started by the Cadet-Kaledin counter-revolutionary revolt against the Soviet authorities, against the workers' and peasants' government, has finally brought the class struggle to a head and has destroyed every chance of setting in a formally democratic way the very acute problems with which history has confronted the peoples of Russia, and in the first place her working class and peasants.

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.

57. There are at present 300,000 bourgeois in the Crimea. These are a source of future profiteering, espionage and every kind of aid to the capitalists. However, we are not afraid of them. We say that we shall take and distribute them, make them submit, and assimilate them.

58. Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation. The Three Sources and Three Constituent Parts of Marxism (1913)

59. We know that an unskilled labourer or a cook cannot immediately get on with the job of state administration. Will the Bolsheviks Retain Government Power? (1917) This citation is often misquoted as 'every cook must learn to govern the state' or even 'every cook can govern the state'

60. 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. The Impending Catastrophe and How to Fight It (1917)

61. Let us...take the most concrete example of state capitalism...It is Germany. Here we have the 'last word' in modern, large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organization, subordinated to Junker-bourgeois imperialism. Cross out the words in italics and [substitute] a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, and you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism.

62. 'Left Wing' Childishness, Lenin, Pravda, May 1918

63. The Poor Peasants' Committees are necessary to fight the kulaks, the rich, the exploiters, who shackle the working peasants. But between the kulaks, who are a small minority, and the poor or semi-proletarians there is the section of the middle peasants. The Soviet government has never declared or conducted any struggle against them. Any steps or measures to the contrary must be condemned most vigorously and stopped. The socialist government must pursue a policy of agreement with the middle peasants.

64. From the vulgar bourgeois standpoint the terms of dictatoship and democracy are mutually exclusive. Failing to understand the theory of class struggle and accustomed to seeing in the political arena the petty squabbling of the various bourgeois circles and coteries, the bourgeois understands by dictatorship the annulment of all liberties and guarantees of democracy, arbitrariness of every kind, and every sort of abuse of power, in a dictator's personal interests.

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

66. I am not fond of the Germans by any means but at the present time it is more advantageous to use them than to challenge them. An independent Poland is very dangerous to Soviet Russia: it is an evil which, however, at the present time has also its redeeming features; for while it exists, we may safely count on Germany, because the Germans hate Poland and will at any time make common cause with us in order to strangle Poland. ... Everything teaches us to look upon Germany as our most reliable ally. Germany wants revenge, and we want revolution. For the moment our aims are the same. When our ways part they will be our most ferocious and our great enemies. Time will tell whether a German hegemony or a Communist federation is to arise out of the ruins of Europe.

67. 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.

68. It is true that liberty is precious-so precious that it must be rationed.

69. 'Am sure that the crushing of the Kazan Czechs and whiteguards, as well as of the kulak extortioners supporting them, will be exemplarily ruthless.'

72. What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy.

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

74. Every cook must learn to rule the State.

75. Nie tedy droga!

77. Max Weber and Vladimir Lenin say, in almost identical words, that with regard to the use of force the state is always a dictatorship. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude