This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Only an armed people can be the real bulwark of popular liberty.
Revolution | Work |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The real education of the masses can never be separated from their independent political, and especially revolutionary, struggle. 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.
Proletariat | Revolution | Struggle |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The working class must break up, smash the “ready-made state machinery,” and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
A standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power.
Defeat | Government | Government |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The immediate union of all banks in the country into a single national bank, and the institution of control over it by the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
To hoard surpluses of grain and other food products at a time when the people in Petrograd, in Moscow, and in dozens of non-agricultural uyezds are not only suffering from a shortage of bread, but are cruelly starving, is an enormous crime deserving the most ruthless punishment.
People |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Nothing will raise the revolutionary energy of the world proletariat so much, nothing will shorten the path leading to its complete victory to such an extent, as this decisive victory of the revolution that has now started in Russia.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Once we accept the point of view that human knowledge develops from ignorance, we shall find millions of examples of it just as simple as the discovery of alizarin in coal tar, millions of observations not only in the history of science and technology but in the everyday life of each and every one of us that illustrate the transformation of “things-in-themselves” into “things-for-us.”
Aims | Method | Proletariat | Revolution | Struggle |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The passing of state power from one class to another is the first, the principal, the basic sign of a revolution, both in the strictly scientific and in the practical political meaning of that term. To this extent, the bourgeois, or the bourgeois-democratic, revolution in Russia is completed.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Any army which does not train to use all the weapons, all the means and methods of warfare that the enemy possesses, or may possess, is behaving in an unwise or even criminal manner. This applies to politics even more than it does to the art of war.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The entire trend of development is towards abolition of coercive domination of one part of society over another.
Democracy | Freedom | Organization | Proletariat | Purpose | Purpose | Time |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The class-conscious proletariat can give its consent to a revolutionary war, which would really justify revolutionary defensism, only on condition: (a) that the power pass to the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat; (b) that all annexations be renounced in deed and not in word; (c) that a complete break be effected in actual fact with all capitalist interests.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Socialists cannot achieve their great aim without fighting against all oppression of nations.
Play |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The state is a machine for the oppression layer by other machine intended to be subject to other layers layer adapted other.
Rule |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
We must pursue the removal of church property by any means necessary in order to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles (do not forget the immense wealth of some monasteries and lauras). Without this fund any government work in general, any economic build-up in particular, and any upholding of soviet principles in Genoa especially is completely unthinkable. In order to get our hands on this fund of several hundred million gold rubles (and perhaps even several hundred billion), we must do whatever is necessary. But to do this successfully is possible only now. All considerations indicate that later on we will fail to do this, for no other time, besides that of desperate famine, will give us such a mood among the general mass of peasants that would ensure us the sympathy of this group, or, at least, would ensure us the neutralization of this group in the sense that victory in the struggle for the removal of church property unquestionably and completely will be on our side. One clever writer on statecraft correctly said that if it is necessary for the realization of a well-known political goal to perform a series of brutal actions then it is necessary to do them in the most energetic manner and in the shortest time, because masses of people will not tolerate the protracted use of brutality. … Now victory over the reactionary clergy is assured us completely. In addition, it will be more difficult for the major part of our foreign adversaries among the Russian emigres abroad, i.e., the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Milyukovites, to fight against us if we, precisely at this time, precisely in connection with the famine, suppress the reactionary clergy with utmost haste and ruthlessness. Therefore, I come to the indisputable conclusion that we must precisely now smash the Black Hundreds clergy most decisively and ruthlessly and put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades.… The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie that we succeed in shooting on this occasion, the better because this "audience" must precisely now be taught a lesson in such a way that they will not dare to think about any resistance whatsoever for several decades.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the readers mind. No matter how many times we reopen King Lear, never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flauberts fathers timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the secondrate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person, the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We could prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hotdog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Of all my Russian books, The Defense contains and diffuses the greatest "warmth"Mwhich may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract chess is supposed to be.
Novels |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world.
Change | Difficulty | Position | Revolution | Time | Old |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
Novels |