Fact Check: Did Lenin say "Facts are stubborn" ?
“Did Lenin say "Facts are stubborn" ?”
Summary
Lenin used the exact wording “facts are stubborn things” in multiple of his writings, including a 1916 letter to N.I. Bukharin and other 1917 documents. The phrase is a documented quotation from his own texts.
Sources 60 searched
- Lenin, Brecht and Michael Moore | Christopher Hayes | The Guardian
For Lenin, propaganda was a tool of the revolutionary's trade. When he noted that "a lie told often enough becomes truth," he was making a useful observation, not a moral judgment. As the influence of Marxism has waned among the American left, this view looks both increasingly quaint and distasteful. Indeed, one of the chief lessons of the Bush administration has been the dangers of detaching rhetoric from facts.
- Lenin's Stubborn Facts - Accuracy In Academia
Lenin famously said that facts are stubborn things, and they are, no matter how much his fans in academia try to hide them. “Currently the public and academic view of markets is distorted,” Paul Dragos Aligica of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University said at the Philadelphia ...
- Tony Cliff: Strategy and Tactics | Counterfire
“Every great action begins with a statement of what is.” Lenin often used to repeat in English, “Facts are stubborn things.” Marxism, he said, “takes its stand on the facts, and not on possibilities.
- Lenin: Statistics and Sociology
Published: First published in the magazine Bolshevik No. 2, 1935. Published according to the manuscript. Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1964, Moscow, Volume 23, pages 271-277. Translated: M. S. Levin, The Late Joe Fineberg and and Others Transcription\Markup: R.
- Letter to Comrades
That is a fact and facts are stubborn things. The facts prove that admirals are capable of treachery no less than Kornilov.
- Lenin: 520. TO N. I. BUKHARIN
As for “chucking out” and polemic in a non-break tone, I must say that I have not yet entered into polemic with you in the press, but exchanged letters with you before any polemic and in order to avoid it. That’s a fact. Facts are stubborn things.[1] You can’t beat facts by gossip.
- Lenin Versus Anti-Lenin Paul Le Blanc
These actualities matter. As Lenin stressed, “facts are stubborn things.”
- In Defense of Lenin - Revolutionary Communists of America
Mr Read continues with his diatribe: “Lenin had no time for democracy, no confidence in the masses and no scruples about the use of violence.” (The World on Fire, 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism, pp.3-4, Jonathan Cape, 2008) There is nothing new in such false claims which rely, not on the writings of Lenin, but heavily on the outpourings of Professors Orlando Figes and Robert Service, two “experts” on the “evils” of Lenin and the Russian revolution.
This fact check is free and donation-based. $1 powers ~30 fact-checks.
