Today is the birthday of Vladimir Lenin.

The slave who is aware of his slavish condition and fights it is a revolutionary. The slave who is not aware of his slavish condition and vegetates in silent, unenlightened, and wordless slavery, is just a slave. The slave who drools when smugly describing the delights of slavish existence and who goes into ecstasies over his good and kind master is a grovelling boor. You do not realise that instead of turning the slave into a revolutionary you are turning slaves into grovellers. All your talk about freedom and democracy is sheer claptrap, parrot phrases, fashionable twaddle, or hypocrisy. It is just a painted signboard. And you yourselves are whited sepulchres. You are mean-spirited boors, and your education, culture, and enlightenment are only a species of thoroughgoing prostitution. For you are selling your souls, and you are selling them not through need, but for “love of the thing”.

Via: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/jun/00.htm