Daily Inspiration Quote by Vladimir Lenin

Lenin’s line has the clean, violent symmetry of a slogan designed to make history feel inevitable. “State” and “freedom” aren’t presented as competing values to be balanced; they’re mutually exclusive conditions. The phrasing doesn’t argue, it pronounces. That rhetorical absolutism matters because it reframes politics as physics: once you accept the premise, the conclusion (and the coercion required to get there) stops looking like a choice.

The intent is tactical as much as philosophical. Lenin is drawing from the Marxist idea that the state is an instrument of class domination, not a neutral referee. If the state exists, someone is using it to keep someone else down; “freedom” can’t fully arrive until that machinery “withers away.” The subtext, of course, is the loophole: before the state disappears, it must be seized and intensified. The promise of a stateless future becomes the moral alibi for a very muscular present. You don’t abolish the scaffold first; you build it higher, insisting the hanging will end hanging.

Context sharpens the edge. In the late imperial and revolutionary Russian world, “freedom” had been cheapened into liberal reforms that left power structures intact. Lenin’s formulation rejects that incrementalism. It also inoculates his movement against criticism: any repression can be filed under “still the state,” still the necessary stage before the real liberation. The sentence is prophetic on purpose, a politics of destiny that asks you to endure the iron now for the paradise later.