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Feuerbach was right when, in reply to those who defended religion on the ground that it consoles the people, he indicated the reactionary significance of consolation: whoever consoles the slave instead of arousing him to rise up against slavery is aiding the slaveowner.

— The Collapse of the Second International by Vladimir Ilich Lenin

This matchless reasoning is such an unutterable travesty of socialism that the best answer to it would be to strike a medal with the portraits of Wilhelm II and Nicholas II on one side and of Plekhanov and Kautsky on the other. True internationalism, we are told, means that we must justify German workers firing at French workers, and French workers firing at German workers, in the name of “defence of the fatherland”!!

— The Collapse of the Second International by Vladimir Ilich Lenin

Opportunism means sacrificing the fundamental interests of the masses to the temporary interests of an insignificant minority of the workers or, in other words, an alliance between a section of the workers and the bourgeoisie, directed against the mass of the proletariat.

— The Collapse of the Second International by Vladimir Ilich Lenin

One cannot be a Marxist without feeling the deepest respect for the great bourgeois revolutionaries who had an historic right to speak for their respective bourgeois “fatherlands”, and, in the struggle against feudalism, led tens of millions of people in the new nations towards a civilised life. Neither can one be a Marxist without feeling contempt for the sophistry of Plekhanov and Kautsky, who speak of the “defence of the fatherland” with regard to the throttling of Belgium by the German imperialists, or with regard to the pact between the imperialists of Britain, France, Russia and Italy on the plundering of Austria and Turkey.

— The Collapse of the Second International by Vladimir Ilich Lenin

“We would have been arrested,” one of the Social-Democratic deputies who voted for the war credits on August is alleged to have declared at a workers’ meeting in Berlin. The workers shouted in reply: “Well, what would have been bad about that?”

If there was no other signal that would instil in the German and the French working masses revolutionary sentiments and the need to prepare for revolutionary action, the arrest of a member of parliament for a courageous speech would have been useful as a call for unity of the proletarians of the various countries in their revolutionary work. It is not easy to bring about such unity; all the more was it the duty of members of parliament, whose high office made their purview of the entire political scene so extensive, to take the initiative.

— The Collapse of the Second International by Vladimir Ilich Lenin

The epoch of imperialism cannot permit the existence, in a single party, of the revolutionary proletariat’s vanguard and the semi-petty-bourgeois aristocracy of the working class, who enjoy morsels of the privileges of their “own” nation’s “Great-Power” status. The old theory that opportunism is a “legitimate shade” in a single party that knows no “extremes” has now turned into a tremendous deception of the workers and a tremendous hindrance to the working-class movement.

— The Collapse of the Second International by Vladimir Ilich Lenin

The epoch of imperialism is one in which the world is divided among the “great” privileged nations that oppress all other nations. Morsels of the loot obtained as a result of these privileges and this oppression undoubtedly fall to the share of certain sections of the petty bourgeoisie and to the working-class aristocracy and bureaucracy. These strata, which form an insignificant minority of the proletariat and of the toiling masses, gravitate towards “Struvism”, because it provides them with a justification of their alliance with their “own” national bourgeoisie, against the oppressed masses of all nations.

— The Collapse of the Second International by Vladimir Ilich Lenin