Top 35 Vladimir Lenin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

— Vladimir Lenin

2. “The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.”

— Vladimir Lenin

3. “Trust is good, but control is better.”

— Vladimir Lenin

4. “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”

— Vladimir Lenin

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5. “Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.”

— Vladimir Lenin

6. “It is necessary sometimes to take one step backward to take two steps forward.”

— Vladimir Lenin

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

— Vladimir Lenin

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

— Vladimir Lenin

9. “Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.”

— Vladimir Lenin

10. “Three keys to success: read, read, read.”

— Vladimir Lenin

11. “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

12. “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

13. “One must always try to be as radical as reality itself.”

— Vladimir Lenin

14. “The revolution does not need historians.”

— Vladimir Lenin

15. “There are no morals in politics; the is only experience. A scoundrel may be of use because he is a scoundrel.”

— Vladimir Lenin

16. “Take any parliamentary country, from America to Switzerland, from France to England, Norway and so forth – in these countries the real business of the ‘state’ is preformed behind the scenes and is carried on by the departments, chancelleries and General Staffs. Parliament itself is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the ’common people.”

— Vladimir Lenin

17. “Peace reigned in Europe, but this was because domination over hundreds of millions of people in the colonies by the European nations was sustained only through constant, incessant, interminable wars, which we Europeans do not regard as wars at all, since all too often they resembled, not wars, but brutal massacres, the wholesale slaughter of unarmed peoples.”

— Vladimir Lenin

18. “Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.”

— Vladimir Lenin

19. “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.”

— Vladimir Lenin

20. “Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.”

— Vladimir Lenin

21. “Logic,′ indeed!”

— Vladimir Lenin

22. “What is a liberal-democratic philistine? An empty gut, filled with cowardice.”

— Vladimir Lenin

23. “We do not at all disagree with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as an aim.”

— Vladimir Lenin

24. “Thus the Labour Party is a ‘capitalist workers’ party’.”

— Vladimir Lenin

25. “We are witnessing a highly instructive and highly comical spectacle. The bourgeois liberal prostitutes are trying to drape themselves in the toga of revolution.”

— Vladimir Lenin

26. “The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.”

— Vladimir Lenin

27. “I particularly approve of and welcome the arrest of millionaire saboteurs in the first and second-class railway carriage.”

— Vladimir Lenin

28. “Those who live by the labor of others are taught by religion to practice charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.”

— Vladimir Lenin

29. “American ethics”, which the European professors and well-meaning bourgeois so hypocritically deplore, have, in the age of finance capital, become the ethics of literally every large city in any country.”

— Vladimir Lenin

30. “At the basis of these swindles and manipulations lies socialised production; but the immense progress of humanity, which achieved this socialisation, goes to benefit the speculators.”

— Vladimir Lenin

31. “Why should we bother to reply to Kautsky? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply. There’s no end to that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautsky is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything.”

— Vladimir Lenin

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

— Vladimir Lenin

33. “I had already drawn up the plan for the next, the seventh chapter, on the ‘Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917.’ But... It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of the revolution’ than to write about it.”

— Vladimir Lenin

34. “I must say that the tasks of the youth in general, and of the Young Communist Leagues and all other organisations in particular, might be summed up in a single word: learn.”

— Vladimir Lenin

35. “Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society.”

— Vladimir Lenin

36. “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”

— Vladimir Lenin

37. “Matter is a philosophicalcategory denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.”

— Vladimir Lenin

38. “As long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will never be utilised for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalists; it will be used for the purpose of increasing those profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries.”

— Vladimir Lenin

39. “Under capitalism democratism is restricted, cramped, curtailed, mutilated by all the conditions of wage slavery and of the poverty and misery of the masses.”

— Vladimir Lenin