237 quotes
Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradiction in the very essence of objects.
Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown shall never be uprooted.
In Italy, comrades, in Italy there was but a Socialist able enough to lead the people through a revolutionary path, Benito Mussolini.
Human thought by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths.
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908)
A monopoly, once it is formed and controls thousands of millions, inevitably penetrates into every sphere of public life, regardless of the form of government and all other "details".
Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917)
Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable. Even the bare mention of a citizen's religion in official documents should unquestionably be eliminated.
People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.
International unity of the workers is more important than the national.
The war is relentless: it puts the alternative in a ruthless relief: either to perish, or to catch up with the advanced countries and outdistance them, too, in economic matters.
The Impending Catastrophe and How to Fight It (1917)
When a real army is in retreat, machine guns are kept ready, and when an orderly retreat degenerates into a disorderly one, the command to fire is given, and quite rightly, too.
We love our language and our country, and we are doing our very utmost to raise her toiling masses (i.e., nine-tenths of her population) to the level of a democratic and socialist consciousness.
This so-called bipartisan system prevailing in America and Britain has been one of the most powerful means of preventing the rise of an independent working-class, i.e., genuinely socialist, party.
Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense.
Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905)
The centralized state power that is peculiar to bourgeois society came into being in the period of the fall of absolutism. Two institutions are most characteristic of this state machine: bureaucracy and a standing army.
The State and Revolution (1917)
The wall is rotten. One good shove and it will collapse.
To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to misrepresent the people in parliament is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism.
The State and Revolution (1917)
We shall not achieve socialism without a struggle. But we are ready to fight, we have started it and we shall finish it with the aid of the apparatus called the Soviets.
The state does not function as we desired. The car does not obey. A man is at the wheel and he seems to lead it, but the car does not drive in the desired direction. It moves as another force wishes.
A Fate Worse than Debt (1988)
This struggle must be organised, according to “all the rules of the art”, by people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity.
What is to be Done? (1902)
Sensation is a subjective image of the objective world.
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908)