Daily Inspiration Quote by Vladimir Lenin

Freedom and the State are staged here as mortal enemies, not uneasy roommates. Lenin’s line has the clean, sermon-like snap of revolutionary rhetoric: it turns a messy political problem into a stark moral geometry. So long as the State exists, freedom is impossible; once freedom arrives, the State evaporates. That symmetry is doing heavy work. It offers believers a way to endure coercion now by promising that coercion is only the scaffolding for a stateless tomorrow.

The intent is political engineering. Lenin isn’t describing an immediate policy so much as building a narrative of historical destiny: the State is a weapon of class rule, therefore any “neutral” State is a myth, and any temporary dictatorship can be framed as a necessary stage on the way to liberation. The subtext is the crucial pivot: if the State is inherently unfree, then the only legitimate State is one that abolishes itself. That’s a powerful alibi for concentrated power, because it depicts opponents not as dissenters but as obstacles to history.

Context matters. Lenin is writing in the Marxist tradition that treats the State as an instrument of domination destined to “wither away” after class antagonisms disappear. Coming out of autocracy, war, and collapse, the promise of a future without coercive institutions was emotionally and strategically useful: it sanctified rupture, demanded discipline, and turned sacrifice into investment.

The line’s brilliance is also its trap. It’s a utopian horizon that can always be postponed, while the present State, in Lenin’s hands, expands in the name of its own extinction.