Quotes by Vladimir Lenin

“One step forward, two steps back. ... It happens in the lives of individuals, and it happens in the history of nations and in the development of parties. It would be the most criminal cowardice to ...”

“There can be no real and effective freedom in a society based on the power of money, in a society in which the masses of working people live in poverty and the handful of rich live like parasites. ...”

“In contradictions to bourgeois customs, to the profit-making, commercialised bourgeois press, to bourgeois literary careerism and individualism, aristocratic anarchism and drive for profit, the soc...”

“Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions. But every voluntary association (including the party) is also free to expel members who use the name of the party to a...”

“Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism is combined with absorption ...”

“Class consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only outside of the economic struggle, outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere fro...”

“To Bring political knowledge to the workers the Social-Democratss must go among all classes of the population, must dispatch units of their army in all directions”

“The only platform from which public exposures can be made is an all-Russian newspaper. Without a political organ, a political movement deserving that name is inconceivable in modern Europe. In this...”

“Hence, political exposure in themselves serve as a powerful instrument for disintegrating the system we oppose, the means for diverting from he enemy his casual or temporary allies, the means for s...”

“The Social-Democrat's ideal should not be a trade union secretary. but a tribune of the people, able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it takes place, no ma...”

“We must 'go among all classes of the people as theoreticians, as propagandists, as agitators and as organizers.”

“Doing all this does not at all mean forgetting that in the long run the legalisation of the working-class movement will be, to our advantage, and not to that of the Zubatovs. On the contrary, it is...”

“One may become a demagogue out of sheer political innocence.”

“The only serious organizational principle the active workers of our movement can accept is strict secrecy, strict selection of members and the training of professional revolutionaries.”

“It would be a great mistake to believe that because it is impossible to establish real democratic control, the members of the revolutionary organization will remain altogether uncontrolled. They ha...”

“In the history of modern socialism this is a phenomenon, that the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement has from national become international.”

“If democracy, in essence, means the abolition of class domination, then why should not a socialist minister charm the whole bourgeois world by orations on class collaboration?”

“Those who are really convinced that they have made progress in science would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for th...”