Vladimir Lenin on Knowledge

"You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind."

"The proletarian revolution calls for a prolonged education of the workers in the spirit of the fullest equality and brotherhood."

"We know that an unskilled labourer or a cook cannot immediately get on with the job of state administration."

"I absolutely do not pretend in the slightest fashion to knowledge of military science."

"To Bring political knowledge to the workers the Social-Democratss must go among all classes of the population, must dispatch units of their army in all directions"

"Hang no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers."

"Every cook must learn to rule the State."

"The abolition of classes means, not merely ousting the landowners and the capitalists - that is something we accomplished with comparative ease; it also means abolishing the small commodity producers, and they cannot be ousted, or crushed; we must learn to live with them."

"War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals... ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat’ – this is the practical commandment of socialism... common aim to clean the land of Russia of all vermin, of fleas – the rogues, of bugs – the rich, and so on and so forth."

"The uprising of the five kulak districts should be mercilessly suppressed… Hang no fewer than one hundred kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers... Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts around, the people will see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks."

"Marx said that the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat lies between capitalism and communism. The more the proletariat presses the bourgeoisie, the more furiously they will resist. We know what vengeance was wreaked on the workers in France in 1848. And when people charge us with harshness we wonder how they can forget the rudiments of Marxism."

"Class consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only outside of the economic struggle, outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the phere of relationships between all the various classes and strata and the state and the government-the sphere of the interrelations between all the various classes."

"The basic question of every revolution is that of state power. Unless this question is understood, there can be no intelligent participation in the revolution, not to speak of guidance of the revolution.The highly remarkable feature of our revolution is that it has brought about dual power. This fact must be grasped first and foremost: unless it is understood, we cannot advance. We must know how to supplement and amend old "formulas."

"It would be a great mistake to believe that because it is impossible to establish real "democratic" control, the members of the revolutionary organization will remain altogether uncontrolled. They have not the time to think about he toy forms of democracy..., but they have a lively sense of their responsibility, because hey know from experience that an organization of real revolutionaries will stop at nothing to rid itself of an undesirable member."