"There is no middle course. This has been shown by experience. Either all power goes to the Soviets and the army is made fully democratic, or another Kornilov affair occurs."

"Our Party's mistake is obvious. The fighting party of the advanced class need not fear mistakes. What it should fear is persistence in a mistake, refusal to admit and correct a mistake out of a false sense of shame."

"The Cadets have good reason to praise Kerensky. He pursues their policies and confers with them and with Rodzyanko behind the back of the people."

 "Just as any turn in the life of an individual teaches him a great deal and brings rich experience and great emotional stress, so a revolution teaches an entire people very rich and valuable lessons in a short space of time."

"The whole course of events, all economic and political conditions, everything that is happening in the armed forces, are increasingly paving the way for the successful winning of power by the working class, which will bring peace, bread and freedom and will hasten the victory of the proletarian revolution in other countries."

"We cannot tolerate a fraud of democracy if we call ourselves “democrats”. We are not democrats but unprincipled people if we tolerate this!!"

"We must withdraw from Zimmerwald immediately."

"Written not later than September 3 (16), 1917"

"The compromise on our part is our return to the pre-July demand of all power to the Soviets and a government of S.R.s and Mensheviks responsible to the Soviets."

"The bitterest enemies of socialism sometimes do it a service by the excessive zeal of their “exposures”. They bear down on the very things that deserve sympathy and emulation. They open the people’s eyes to the infamy of the bourgeoisie by the very nature of their attacks."

"At the present moment it is impossible to remain loyal to Marxism, to remain loyal to the revolution unless insurrection is treated as an art."

"At the moment we must campaign not so much directly against Kerensky, as indirectly against him, namely, by demanding a more and more active, truly revolutionary war against Kornilov."

"The law on libel in the press has virtually been suspended in Russia. Slanderers, especially those contributing to the bourgeois papers, have been granted complete freedom."

A Letter to the Central Committee and the Petrograd And Moscow Committees Of The R.S.D.L.P.(B.). 

"The Socialist-Revolutionary Party has betrayed you, comrade peasants. It has betrayed the hovels and deserted to the palaces, if not the royal palaces, then those where the Cadets, those bitter enemies of the revolution, and particularly the peasant revolution, sit in the same government as the Chernovs, Peshekhonovs, and Avksentyevs."

"To be really revolutionary, the democrats of Russia today must march in very close alliance with the proletariat, supporting it in its struggle as the only thoroughly revolutionary class."

"After three years of war, efforts are still being made to feed the workers with the emptiest promises: “In Stockholm they are going” to renounce national unity."

"The whole political system of Russia was reflected in the incident of August 18 like the sun in a pool of water: the Bonapartist government, the death penalty, the criminal law, the coating of these “pleasant” (for the provocateurs) pills by just the kind of phrases that Louis Napoleon used to give out about equality, fraternity, liberty, the honour and prestige of the country, the traditions of the Great Revolution, the suppression of anarchy."

"He hears the voice of approbation
Not in the dulcet sounds of praise,
But in the savage cries of indignation!"

Written in the summer of 1917, in the heat of the Russian Revolution, Lenin’s State and Revolution is a key work of Marxism. Here, Lenin explains that, stripped of all non-essentials, the state is in the final analysis “groups of armed men”: the army and the police, in defence of the ruling class.