Words matter. These are the best Lenin Quotes from famous people such as Michael Johns, Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Platonov, Daniel Silva, Simon Sebag Montefiore, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history’s most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.
I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice… but because of his omnipresent images.
If kids can forget their own mothers but still have a sense of comrade Lenin, then Soviet power really is here to stay!
I absolutely fell in love with Moscow. It’s one of those places where you can’t help but trip over history at every turn. It’s a city of enormous contradictions. Within a few yards of Lenin’s Tomb is some of the most expensive shopping in the world.
The shameless criminality of Lenin, Stalin, and the Cheka cast a long shadow, but I don’t see their kind returning anytime soon.
The hollowing out of the heartland was good for Walmart’s bottom line: its slogan might have been an amoral maxim attributed to Lenin – ‘The worse, the better.’
The statues of Lenin and Stalin are down, but the fight against their ghosts seems harder.
Marx and Lenin were ahead of their time. Marx wrote before offshoring of jobs and the financialization of the economy. Lenin presided over a communist revolution that jumped the gun by taking place in a country in which feudal elements still predominated over capitalism.
I’ve travelled to some of the places where Russian language and Russian culture were made part of the fabric of life long before Lenin arrived at Finland Station – and where Russian is now being rolled back, post-1991.
Russian scorn for liberal democracy has a long history, and a certain kind of Russian disdain for the West is nothing new. As far back as 1920, Lenin declared that parliaments were ‘historically obsolete’ and predicted that it was just a matter of time before they disappeared.
Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.
Lenin said that people vote with their feet. Well, that’s what’s happening. They either go, or they don’t go. It’s all politics. It’s all demographics.
How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
Lenin had just reflected that the revolution would never happen in his lifetime when in February 1917, hungry crowds in Petrograd overthrew Nicholas II while the revolutionaries were abroad, exiled, or infiltrated by the secret police.
We didn’t take the words of Vladimir Lenin seriously until Communism spread across the globe. And unfortunately, the president didn’t take the words of groups like ISIS seriously until they established a sweeping self-proclaimed Islamic Caliphate.
In Tbilisi in 1990, I recall watching zealous Georgians smash statues of Lenin and Stalin. A few days earlier, though, in Moscow I had been invited to address the Red Army, as one of the first Brits to benefit from Glasnost. The subject they chose: The Cuban Missile Crisis.
On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin’s remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.
I believe, as Lenin said, that this revolutionary chaos may yet crystallize into new forms of life.
The Russians are turning east to the Chinese – to the Europeans’ surprise. It always seemed to me that the relationship between Russia and China would shift from being based in Marx and Lenin to being based in oil and gas.
Lenin, the greatest theorist of them all, did not know what he was going to do after he had got the power.
