Mikhail T-N > Mikhail's Quotes

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.”
― Vladimir Lenin, What Is to Be Done?

“Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“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.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution

“Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“Every society is three meals away from chaos”
― Vladimir Lenin

“This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning—from "I" to "we". If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I", and cuts you off forever from the "we". ”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Three keys to success: read, read, read.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.”
― Vladimir Lenin, Estado y revolución

“The only way to survive such shitty times, if you ask me, is to write and read big, fat books, you know? And I’m writing now another book on Hegelian dialectics, subjectivity, ontology, quantum physics and so on. That’s the only way to survive. Like Lenin. I will use his example. You know what Lenin did, in 1915, when World War I exploded? He went to Switzerland and started to read Hegel.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution - real girl's talk.”
― Nina Simone, I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone

“Imperialism: The final stage of Capitalism.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“We are not utopians, we do not “dream” of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and "foremen and accountants".”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution

“The goal of Socialism is Communism.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it.”
― V. I. Lenin

“Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“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)”
― Winston Churchill

“All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake "public opinion" for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.”
― Vladimir Lenin, Revolution!: Sayings of Vladimir Lenin

“We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighbouring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands, don't clutch at us and don't besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are "free" to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, What Is to Be Done?

“Capitalists can buy themselves out of any crisis, so long as they make the workers pay”
― Vladimir Ilich Lenin

“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?”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism: a popular outline

“Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“Attention, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not our task to descend to the level of the 'working masses'.”
― Vladimir I lenin

“The intellectual forces of the workers and peasants are growing and getting stronger in their fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the educated classes, the lackeys of capital, who consider themselves the brains of the nation. In fact they are not its brains but its shit.”
― Vladimir Lenin, Letters of Lenin (Russian Studies: Perspectives on the Revolution)

“The feminine section of the proletarian army is of particularly great significance... the success of a revolution depends on the extent to which women take part in it.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes).”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“If it’s not one god it’s another. Allah or oil. Jesus or Jewels. Lenin or lust.”
― Victor Robert Lee, Performance Anomalies

“He loved her with the fire of a thousand suns, she was his solace in the chaos, his redemption.”
― Lenin