Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin, was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as head of government of the Russian Republic from 1917 to 1918, of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1918 to 1924, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party communist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his political theories are known as Leninism...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionLeader
Date of Birth22 April 1870
CountryRussian Federation
The Bolsheviks could not have retained power for two and a half months, let alone two and a half years, without the most rigorous and truly iron discipline in our Party.
Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.
Human reason has discovered many amazing things in nature and will discover still more, and will thereby increase its power over nature.
To accept anything on trust, to preclude critical application and development, is a grievous sin.
Act with the greatest determination and on the offensive. The defensive is the death of every armed rising.
The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of another in the endeavor to keep them disunited.
The working class must break up, smash the "ready-made state machinery," and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.
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 the old.
Human thought by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths.
All countries will inevitably have to do what Russia has done.
In capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority.
One of the chief symptoms of every revolution is the sharp and sudden increase in the number of ordinary people who take an active, independent and forceful interest in politics.
It is not difficult to be a revolutionary when revolution has already broken out and is in spate, when all people are joining the revolution just because they are carried away, because it is the vogue, and sometimes even from careerist motives. It is far more difficult--and far more precious--to be a revolutionary when the conditions for direct, open, really mass and really revolutionary struggle do not yet exist.
Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people.