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Lenin Quotes

Browse 41 quotes about Lenin.

Lenin Quotes

“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.”

Inspirational QuotesTrumpHegelLeninShitty Times
Author:Slavoj Žižek
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“Of the Russian exiles, Lenin is the last I should have picked as a man of destiny. [Angelica] Balabanoff says that she cannot remember where she first met Lenin and that even when she became conscious of his existence he made no impression upon her. Many others would say the same, but I remember vividly my first meeting with him. It was at dinner in a small Greek restaurant in Soho, not far from the house which bears the tablet commemorating the fact that Karl Marx once lived there. I met him again at Stuttgart, [at the International Socialist Congress] in 1907. In the meantime he had acquired the reputation of being a brilliant student of Marxian economics, a dangerous antagonist in all intra-party controversies and a master of revolutionary tactics and sectarian conspiracies. At the conference he was usually surrounded by a small group of whispering disciples. … Some of Lenin's enemies believed that he was a paid emissary of the Russian police. His tactics and the dissensions which he promoted among the Russian socialists aroused suspicion. He was a fanatic, a disorganizer, a sectarian, who gave no indication in pre-war days of having the qualities of a national leader. He won his battles but they were always directed against his comrades.”

DestinyLondonExileRussian RevolutionKarl MarxLeninFanaticSectarianVladimir LeninBolshevik
Book:Revolution Why, How, When?
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“In a short essay called ‘Liberating Life: Women’s Revolution’, Öcalan (2013) outlines the core tenets of his sociological/historico-philosophical writings. Öcalan’s fundamental claim is that ‘mainstream civilisation’, commences with the enslavement of ‘Woman’, through what he calls ‘Housewifisation’ (2013). As such, it is only through a ‘struggle against the foundations of this ruling system’ (2013), that not only women, but also men can achieve freedom, and slavery can be destroyed. Any liberation of life, for Öcalan, can only be achieved through a Woman’s revolution. In his own words: ‘If I am to be a freedom fighter, I cannot just ignore this: woman’s revolution is a revolution within a revolution’ (2013). For Öcalan, the Neolithic era is crucial, as the heyday of the matricentric social order. The figure of the Woman is quite interesting, and is not just female gender, but rather a condensation of all that is ‘equal’ and ‘natural’ and ‘social’, and its true significance is seen as a mode of social governance, which is non-hierarchical, non-statist, and not premised upon accumulation (2013). This can only be fully seen, through the critique of ‘civilisation’ which is equally gendered and equated with the rise of what he calls the ‘dominant male’ and hegemonic sexuality. These forms of power as coercive are embodied in the institution of masculine civilisation. And power in the matriarchal structures are understood more as authority, they are natural/organic. What further characterised the Neolithic era is the ways through which society was based upon solidarity and sharing – no surplus in production, and a respect for nature. In such a social order, Öcalan finds through his archaeology of ‘sociality’ the traces of an ecological ontology, in which nature is ‘alive and animated’, and thus no different from the people themselves. The ways in which Öcalan figures ‘Woman’, serves as metaphor for the Kurdish nation-as-people (not nation-state). In short, if one manages to liberate woman, from the hegemonic ‘civilisation’ of ‘the dominant male’, one manages to liberate, not only the Kurds, but the world. It is only on this basis that the conditions of possibility for a genuine global democratic confederalism, and a solution to the conflicts of the Middle East can be thinkable. Once it is thinkable, then we can imagine a freedom to organise, to be free from any conception of ownership (of property, persons, or the self), a freedom to show solidarity, to restore balance to life, nature, and other humans through ‘love’, not power. In Rojava, The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, Öcalan’s political thoughts are being implemented, negotiated and practised. Such a radical experiment, which connects theory with practice has not been seen on this scale, ever before, and although the Rojava administration, the Democratic Union Party, is different from the PKK, they share the same political leader, Öcalan. Central to this experiment are commitments to feminism, ecology and justice.”

LibertyFeminismWomen S RightsLeninMarxism LeninismSosyalizm
Author:Abdullah Ocalan
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“Now there is a modern-day anthropology* for the criminal type: a great number of so-called 'born criminals' have pale faces, large cheekbones, a coarse lower jaw, and deeply shining eyes. How can one not recall this when one thinks of Lenin and thousands like him? How many pale faces, high cheekbones and strikingly asymmetric features mark the soldiers of the Red Army and, generally speaking, also of the common Russian people - how many of them, these savage types, have Mongolian atavism directly in their blood! They are all from Murom, the white-eyed Chud. And it is precisely these individuals, these very Russichi, who gave us so many 'daring pirates', so many vagabonds, escapees, scoundrels and tramps - it is precisely these people whom we have recruited for the glory, pride and hope of the Russian social revolution. So why should we feign surprise at the results?”

CriminalsRussiaSoviet UnionAnthropologySoviet RussiaLeninRed ArmyAnti Communism
Book:Cursed Days: Diary of a Revolution
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“Marx, Engels, and Lenin have carried on the tradition of rational and non-mystical approach to all human problems; this is the tradition of the best Greek philosophers and the founders of modern science. Careful analysis; separation of factors; the following of causes into their effects; reliance on experiments; all are taken over into Marxism and provide it with a hard scientific core. There is nowhere any pandering to special intuitions or spiritual experiences.”

ScienceMarxismEngelsLeninDialectical Materialism
Book:Engels and Science
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“Lenin clearly and unambiguously poses the question of the relationship between the ‘form’ of materialism and its ‘essence’, of the impermissibility of identification of the former with the latter. The ‘form’ of materialism is found in those concrete-scientific ideas about the constitution of matter (about the ‘physical’, about ‘atoms and electrons’) and in natural scientific generalizations of these ideas that are inevitably turn out to be historically limited, changing, subject to reconsideration by the natural science itself. The ‘essence’ of materialism is found in the acceptance of the objective reality that exists independently of human cognition and that is only reflected in it. The creative development of dialectical materialism on the basis of the ‘philosophical conclusions derived from the newest discoveries of natural science’ is, according to Lenin, found not in the reconsideration of this essence and not in making the ideas of natural scientists eternal, but in the deepening of the understanding of the ‘relationship between cognition and the physical world’ that is connected with these new ideas about nature. The dialectical understanding of the relationship between the ‘form’ and ‘essence’ of materialism, and therefore, the relationship between ‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology’ constitutes the ‘spirit of dialectical materialism”

PhilosophyScienceReligionIdealismMarxEngelsLeninDialectical MaterialismObscurantismPositivist Science
Book:Intelligent Materialism: Essays on Hegel and Dialectics
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“Marx is the last or (depending on how you count it) the originating prophet. He was not just a thinker or a sage -he was the formulator of a world-revolutionary movement. A movement that claimed to know how to reorder absolutely wverything in human affairs in order to arrive at a utopian society. A utopian society that has never been achieved but that activists across the West still dream of instituting next time: always next time.”

SocialismCommunismGenocideMarxismMaoBlmMarxStalinAntifaLenin
Book:The War on the West
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“Marx is the last or (depending on how you count it) the originating prophet. He was not just a thinker or a sage -he was the formulator of a world-revolutionary movement. A movement that claimed to know how to reorder absolutely everything in human affairs in order to arrive at a utopian society. A utopian society that has never been achieved but that activists across the West still dream of instituting next time: always next time.”

SocialismCommunismGenocideMarxismMaoBlmMarxStalinAntifaLenin
Book:The War on the West
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“Lenin had created the conditions for the rise of Stalin, but like Dr Frankenstein the monster outgrew him. He suffered a cerebral haemorrhage on 24 May 1922 and from this time forward his involvement in political affairs was sporadic. Too late he realised, on 25 December 1922, that Stalin represented a real threat to the stability of the Party. He penned a postscript to his famous “Testament”. This called for the removal of Stalin as General Secretary but significantly not from the Politburo. Despite Lenin’s request, the “Testament” was only discussed in the Central Committee, and Stalin’s offer to resign as General Secretary was rejected by Zinoviev and Kamenev. They had now formed a triumvirate with him, and during Lenin’s illness Zinoviev had assumed nominal leadership of the Party. Fearing that any demotion of Stalin would lead to the elevation of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev not only supported him, but hushed up the letters of Lenin.”

SocialismCommunismSoviet RussiaStalinLeninTrotskyLeft CommunismKamenevZinoviev
Book:Russia: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1905-1924. A View from the Communist Left
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“While making studies of the revolutionary movement, I was aided for a time by Angelica Balabanoff. This restless, diminutive Russian knew almost everyone engaged in socialist and communist activities. Aflame with the spirit of revolt, she spared no effort to infect others with her hatred for the capitalist regime. She was very useful as she not only brought me in contact with everyone I wished to meet, but she also spoke fluently many of the European languages. She would often sit beside me at conferences and in restaurants, translating into my ear, in a soft and to others almost inaudible voice, everything of interest said by the various speakers, no matter from what country they came. She was afterward one of Mussolini's chief aids and became his assistant editor when he took control of *Avanti*. In 1917 she went back to Russia with Lenin and other communists in the train so kindly provided by the German government, which expected them to augment the chaos already paralyzing its enemies on the East. Revolutionists talk fast and are often well educated. In some groups at dinner three or four languages would be spoken and, of course, at all the socialists and labor conferences delegates from many countries delivered their addresses in their native tongues. These different languages were laboriously translated by official interpreters. It was unnecessary to follow these dreary repetitions when Balabanoff sat beside me. She was often the official interpreter at the larger gatherings and her translations were never questioned — although she often excelled the orator in eloquence when he was expressing some of her cherished and more violently revolutionary views. Although she was a valued aid to both Mussolini and Lenin — I believe she brought them together at one time — and the most impassioned revolutionist I have ever met, she left Russia in 1921, ill and thoroughly disillusioned by the Reign of Terror.”

RevolutionCommunistFascismTranslationDisillusionRussian RevolutionLeninMussoliniAngelica BalabanoffBalabanoff
Book:Revolution Why, How, When?
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“Ya burjuva ideolojisi ya da sosyalist ideoloji. Bunun ortası yok (çünkü insanlık "üçüncü" bir ideoloji yaratmış değildir; ayrıca genel olarak sınıfsal çelişkilerle parçalanmış bir toplumda, hiçbir zaman sınıflar dışı veya sınıflar üstü bir ideoloji olamaz). Bu nedenle, sosyalist ideolojinin her türlü küçümsenmesi, ondan her türlü uzaklaşma, burjuva ideolojisinin güçlendirilmesi anlamına gelir.”

LeninSosyalizmBurjuvaziIdeolojiSınıf
Book:What Is to Be Done?
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“In insisting that peasant activity contrary to Communist policies could be defined as kulak while at the same time maintaining that his approach to the peasantry was based on scientific Marxist class analysis, Lenin provided his successors with conceptualizations that would be used in collectivization when Stalin launched a war against all peasants.”

SocialismCommunismUssrStalinLeninSovietsCollectvization
Book:Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance
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“تغيَّرت الصورة قليلاً في الفترة من 1932 – 1944 إذ هاجر 265 ألف يهودي، وهو أعلى رقم بلغته أفواج المهاجرين أثناء الانتداب. وهذا لا يعود إلى العروق الأزلية إياها، وإنما إلى وصول هتلر إلى السلطة، ولذا قال أحدهم إنه إذا كان هرتزل هو ماركس الحركة الصهيونية، أي منظّرها، فإن هتلر هو لينين الصهيونية، أي من وضعها موضع التنفيذ.”

HitlerZionismMarxPolitical IdeologyLeninBritish MandateHerzl
Book:انهيار إسرائيل من الداخل
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“Far from addressing the Soviet nationalities question, the Afghan adventure had, as was by now all too clear, exacerbated it. If the USSR faced an intractable set of national minorities, this was in part a problem of its own making: it was Lenin and his successors, after all, who invented the various subject ‘nations’ to whom they duly assigned regions and republics. In an echo of imperial practices elsewhere, Moscow had encouraged the emergence—in places where nationality and nationhood were unheard of fifty years earlier—of institutions and intelligentsias grouped around a national urban center or ‘capital.”

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Book:Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
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“We too aspire to communism as the most perfect achievement of human solidarity, but it must be anarchist communism, that is, freely desired and accepted, and the means by which the freedom of everyone is guaranteed and can expand; for these reasons we maintain that State communism, which is authoritarian and imposed, is the most hateful tyranny that has ever afflicted, tormented and handicapped mankind.”

CommunismAnarchismMarxistLeninAnarcho CommunismLeninismMarxist Leninism
Book:Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas
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“Bakunin's warnings about the "Red bureaucracy" that would institute "the worst of all despotic governments" were long before Lenin, and were directed against the followers of Mr. Marx. There were, in fact, followers of many different kinds; Pannekoek, Luxemburg, Mattick and others are very far from Lenin, and their views often converge with elements of anarcho-syndicaIism. Korsch and others wrote sympathetically of the anarchist revolution in Spain, in fact. There are continuities from Marx to Lenin, but there are also continuities to Marxists who were harshly critical of Lenin and Bolshevism. Teodor Shanin's work in the past years on Marx's later attitudes towards peasant revolution is also relevant here. I'm far from being a Marx scholar, and wouldn't venture any serious judgement on which of these continuities reflects the "real Marx," if there even can be an answer to that question.”

SocialismMarxismMarxistMarxLeninLeninismMarxist Leninism
Book:Chomsky On Anarchism
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“In Lenin's view, such changes were positive: nations, as products of capitalist economic relations, fitted into classic Marxist stage theory of development. Even Stalin, who differed on the implications for Soviet policy, agreed that nations were an inescapable phase through which all humans communities must pass. Ultimately, they (like, capitalism) would be superseded, but for precapitalist societies national development and nationalist movements were treated as progressive. Lenin drew a further distinction between great-power nationalism, which oppressed others, and small-power nationalism, which formed in response o it. In places - such as Russia - that had been responsible for national and colonial oppression of others, nationalism was to be combated without mercy and torn out by the roots. Among groups that had been victims of national or colonial oppression, by contrast-such as in the tsarist imperial periphery, where Russian power had created deep economic, political, and social resentment-the Leninist approach was to build socialism while encouraging indigenous development and national differentiation.”

NationalismUssrStalinLeninCentral AsiaUzbekistanNational Question
Book:Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia
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“Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin), your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold. Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? ... If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done in the Middle Ages. I hope you will not answer me that Power is for political men a professional duty, and that any attack against that power must be considered as a threat against which one must guard oneself at any price. This opinion is no longer held even by kings... Are you so blinded, so much a prisoner of your own authoritarian ideas, that you do not realise that being at the head of European Communism, you have no right to soil the ideas which you defend by shameful methods ... What future lies in store for Communism when one of its most important defenders tramples in this way every honest feeling?”

PoliticsFreedomSocialismCommunismTorturePeterLibertarianismDictatorshipAnarchismLeninAnarcho CommunismVladimir LeninSyndicaism
Author:Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
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“One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Hardy and I were talking about Einstein. Hardy had met him several times, and I had recently returned from visiting him. Hardy was saying that in his lifetime there had only been two men in the world, in all the fields of human achievement, science, literature, politics, anything you like, who qualified for the Bradman class. For those not familiar with cricket, or with Hardy's personal idiom, I ought to mention that “the Bradman class” denoted the highest kind of excellence: it would include Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Newton, Archimedes, and maybe a dozen others. Well, said Hardy, there had only been two additions in his lifetime. One was Lenin and the other Einstein.”

ScienceLiteraturePoliticsNewtonShakespeareCambridgeWilliam ShakespeareEinsteinTolstoyLeninAlbert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLeo TolstoyArchimedesVladimir LeninG H HardyBradman ClassCount Lev Nikolayevich TolstoyGodfrey HardyGodfrey Harold HardyLev Nikolayevich TolstoyVladimir Ilyich Lenin
Book:Variety of Men
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“For Lenin the premise was that a Marxist is someone “who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat”. This term dictatorship has been repeatedly seized on by the defenders of capitalism to insist “dictatorship” is what Marxists aim at all the time (and, of course there was Stalin wasn’t there?). But the term dictatorship when used by Marx stems from the material fact that this is really what the state is in any class society, whatever democratic institutions it clothes itself in. Thus the bourgeoisie today exercises a dictatorship over society by virtue of the parliamentary regime which gives an appearance of openness, but which in fact is easily dominated by those who control the means of production (and hence the means of production of ideas). In this sense the dictatorship of the proletariat would be no different. It would also be an instrument of class rule but against the bourgeoisie and their allies. The main difference would be that this new dictatorship means a vast extension of democracy “which, for the first time, becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags.”

SocialismCommunismMarxismLeninDictatorship Of The ProletariatLeft CommunismWorkers Democracy
Book:Russia: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1905-1924. A View from the Communist Left
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“The Socialist Party had a slight, sympathetic contact with the Bolsheviks. In March, 1915, the Socialist Standard had on its front page a statement headed A RUSSIAN CHALLENGE. The Russian party, finding itself uninvited to a London conference of social-democrtic parties of the Allied nations,sent a declaration which every left-wing paper refused to publish before it was recieved by the SPGB...the statement condemned the war and the 'monstrous crime against socialism' of the labour leaders who had entered war governments.”

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Author:Robert Barltrop
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“The transitional nature of the 1920's can also be discerned in what may be labeled a new kind of 'dvoeverie' (or dual faith), a syncretistic belief that combined peasant ways and new Communist practices in tentative and uneasy assimilation. For example, there were reports of portraits of Lenin or Kalinin turning up in icon corners and of habit-ridden old peasants crossing themselves in front of these holy images.”

UssrLeninCollectivizationKalinin
Book:Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance
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“Two weeks later General Kaledin received a deputation from his troops. 'Will you,' the asked, 'promise to divide the estates of the Cossack landlords among the working Cossacks?' 'Only over my dead body,' responded Kaledin. A month later, seeing his army melt away before his eyes, Kaledin blew out his brains. And the Cossack movement was no more...”

RussiaUssrRussian RevolutionLeninTrotskyCossackKaledin
Book:Ten Days That Shook the World
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“There was more than a little truth in Trotsky's angry accusation of April 1912, after he had suffered the theft of the title of his journal [Pravda], that Lenin nourished himself on discord and chaos. But so did all revolutionary politicians, for revolutionary changes issue from profound crises. The bloody trenches of World War I created an enormous new revolutionary constituency, and only those leaders who knew how to exploit it would be prepared for the struggles that lay ahead.”

LeninTrotsky1990Pravda1912
Book:Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power
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“Within days it was announced by the Central Committee that Lenin would not be buried next to his mother, as he had requested, but that his body would be embalmed and buried in the Kremlin Wall (and soon in a specially built mausoleum he remains to this day). His widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, opposed this and further asked that nothing be named after him […] She was ignored, just as she was ignored in her request that Lenin’s “Testament” be read out to the Party Congress. Instead, Petersburg would now become Leningrad, the 21 January was to become a day of national mourning, and statues (which Lenin reputedly said were only good for “collecting bird shit”) would soon appear everywhere.”

SocialismCommunismLeninKremlinLeft CommunismNadezhda Krupskaya
Book:Russia: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1905-1924. A View from the Communist Left
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“The fact that entangled particles can influence each other faster than the speed of light is taken as proof that there is a spiritual domain of instant communication outside material reality; the fact that a wave function collapses into reality through observation is interpreted as a proof that observation creates reality... no wonder many podcasts claim that quantum mechanics proves material reality is a simulacrum, that all there is, is spirit, etc.”

PhilosophyScienceSpiritMaterialismMetaphysicsQuantum MechanicsSpiritualismLeninSlavoj Zizek
Book:Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy
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“It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. … Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.”

JesusFreedomResponsibilityMarriageChristianityCorruptionSocialismDictatorshipHitlerFrench RevolutionNietzscheCelibacyInquisitionFreudMarxStalinLeninGalileoSubhuman
Book:Listen, Little Man!
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