Russian revolutionary (1870-1924)
Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes).
VLADIMIR LENIN
Summary of Dialectics
When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward--or go back. He who now talks about the "freedom of the press" goes backward, and halts our headlong course toward Socialism.
VLADIMIR LENIN
speech in Smolny, Petrograd, November 17, 1917
Behind the epistemological scholasticism of empirio-criticism one must not fail to see the struggle of parties in philosophy, a struggle which in the last analysis reflects the tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society.
VLADIMIR LENIN
"Conclusion", The Recent Revolution in Natural Science and Philosophical Idealism
Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.
VLADIMIR LENIN
"L. N. Tolstoy and the Modern Labour Movement", Nash Put, November 28, 1910
Attention, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not at all our task to descend to the level of the "working masses."
VLADIMIR LENIN
"The Primitiveness of the Economists and the Organization of the Revolutionaries", What Is To Be Done?
We stand for an alliance with all countries without exception.
VLADIMIR LENIN
interview with Karl Wiegand, February 18, 1920
Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people.
VLADIMIR LENIN
The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism
In the two months following the revolution the industrialists have robbed the whole of Russia.
VLADIMIR LENIN
"War and Revolution", Collected Works