Vladimir Lenin Quotes

Social inequality … divides society into two classes -- the wage-slaves and the grabbers of capital

Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division, and from the antagonism between poor and rich, means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.

How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

Under capitalism we have a state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another.

Capitalists … can grow rich only where there is an oppressed body of labourers

The “natural laws of economics” are in fact tools in the hands of the avaricious and the greedy for keeping down and oppressing the laboring classes.

The struggle for power in our day lies not between Crown and people, or between a caste of nobles and a bourgeoisie, but between the classes who have property and the classes who have none.

I've always been that contemptible thing, a luxury communist.

Capitalism is the worst friend of humanity.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

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

The rich don't exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Capitalism is a stupid system, a backward system.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

In today’s America the working class is paid to fight wars that the powerful would never risk.

The Privileged and the People form Two Nations.

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

The strongest bulwark of the capitalistic system is the ignorance of its victims.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term ...to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

There is no mutuality of interests ... between capital and labor. It is the iron heel of a soulless monopoly, crushing the manhood out of sovereign citizens.

The struggle, begun this morning upon the hustings of your old town, is not a struggle between two men—it is a struggle between two countries. On the one side, the side of the Whig candidate, hangs the red banner beneath which your senate has been sacked, your commerce has been wrecked, your nobility has been dishonored, your peasants have been starved. On the other side … floats the green flag beneath which your senate sat, your commerce thrived, your nobility honored, your peasants prospered.