Parenting & Family Quote by Vladimir Lenin

Education is power, and Lenin is saying the quiet part out loud: if you can shape a child’s mind early, you won’t need to keep persuading the adult later. The sentence is built like a threat disguised as a certainty. “Give us” turns ideology into custody; the child isn’t a citizen-in-training but a resource to be secured. “For 8 years” adds bureaucratic precision, as if revolutionary conviction can be manufactured on a timetable. “Forever” is the clincher, a blunt promise of permanence that flatters the revolutionary project with the aura of inevitability.

The subtext isn’t only about belief; it’s about infrastructure. Bolshevism, in Lenin’s world, isn’t meant to compete in an open marketplace of ideas. It’s meant to build the conditions in which competing ideas don’t get much oxygen. Early schooling, youth organizations, newspapers, rituals, slogans, and the replacement of church and family authority with state authority: this is how a revolution stops being an event and becomes an environment. The line also betrays anxiety. If the ideology were self-evidently liberating, it wouldn’t require capture at age eight.

Context matters because the Bolsheviks were trying to consolidate power in a fractured post-imperial society. Civil war, famine, illiteracy, and competing factions made loyalty a practical problem, not a philosophical one. Lenin’s remark frames the solution as generational: don’t just win today’s battles; program tomorrow’s adults. It’s revolutionary realism with a chilling edge: the future belongs to whoever gets to raise it.