Vladimir Lenin Quotes

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

Raise your eyes and count the small gang of your oppressors who are only strong through the blood they suck from you and through your arms which you lend them unwillingly.

A people that patiently lets itself be trampled, deserves to be trampled and crushed.

Power wears out those who do not have it.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

All oppression creates a state of war.

Without a Prospero-Caliban relationship to balance the Prospero-Ariel one, 'The Tempest' loses much of its resonance.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

History shows that, more often than not, loss of sovereignty leads to liberalisation imposed in the interests of the powerful.

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.

Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.

Do you think that the people of South Africa, or anywhere on the continent of Africa, or India, or Pakistan are longing to be kicked around all over again?

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?

The Americans will have no interest contrary to the grandeur and glory of England, when they are not oppressed by the weight of it …

The role of the inhabitants of the American hemisphere has for centuries been purely passive. Politically they were nonexistent. We are still in a position lower than slavery, and therefore it is more difficult for us to rise to the enjoyment of freedom.

Power is dangerous for those who do not have it.

They would make fine servants .... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so imperialism is in the mind of the imperialized.

We have a full right, by our own best wisdom, and then even by compulsion to dictate terms and conditions to them [Native Americans] .... The Indian must be made to feel he is in the grasp of a superior.

The British minister mistakes the Irish character. Had he intended to make Ireland a slave, he should have kept her a beggar. There is no middle policy … greatly emancipate or fundamentally destroy.

Through the history of the world there have always been exploiters and exploited. There always will be ... because the great mass of men are made by nature to be slaves, they are unfit to control themselves, and for their own good need masters.

People who bear the brunt of dominant economic and military power have always resented, even hated, the subordination they experience while admiring grudgingly the institutions that sustain the subordination.

We will make your women bear our children who will become your masters.