Top 85 Leon Trotsky Quotes
#1. The pillars of Hercules of the United States are vulgarity and stupidity.
Leon Trotsky
#2. One of the most surprising things in life is the sudden realization that one has become old
Leon Trotsky
#3. Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever.
Leon Trotsky
#4. Lincoln's significance lies in his not hesitating before the most severe means, once they were found to be necessary, in achieving a great historic aim posed by the development of a young nation.
Leon Trotsky
#5. Insurrection is an art, and like all arts has its own laws.
Leon Trotsky
#6. Culture feeds on the sap of economics, and a material surplus is necessary, so that culture may grow, develop and become subtle.
Leon Trotsky
#7. Dialectical thought is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion.
Leon Trotsky
#8. The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.
Leon Trotsky
#9. Everyone has a right to be stupid, but Comrade McDonald abuses the privilege.
Leon Trotsky
#10. Life is not an easy matter ... . You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.
Leon Trotsky
#11. You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.
Leon Trotsky
#12. Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction.
Leon Trotsky
#13. Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravity.
Leon Trotsky
#14. Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely. But one must know the limitations of force; one must know when to blend force with a maneuver, a blow with an agreement.
Leon Trotsky
#15. The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.
Leon Trotsky
#16. The motive force of history is truth and not lies.
Leon Trotsky
#17. The revenge of history is more powerful than the revenge of the most powerful General Secretary.
Leon Trotsky
#18. From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.
Leon Trotsky
#19. In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a dictator substitutes himself for the central committee.
Leon Trotsky
#20. The dictatorship of the Communist Party is maintained by recourse to every form of violence.
Leon Trotsky
#21. The people will have the right to elect their representatives from a list of candidates [who have been approved by the Party].
Leon Trotsky
#23. The worst crime on the part of the revolutionaries would be to give the smallest concessions to the privileges and prejudices of the whites. Whoever gives his little finger to the devil of chauvinism is lost.
Leon Trotsky
#24. Where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation
Leon Trotsky
#25. Generally speaking, by the way, that is the moral of the opponents of violence in politics: they renounce violence when it comes to introducing changes in what already exists, but in defense of the existing order they will not stop at the most ruthless acts.
Leon Trotsky
#26. The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.
Leon Trotsky
#27. Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain - at least in a poor country like Russia - and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.
Leon Trotsky
#28. He who slanders the victim aids the executioner.
Leon Trotsky
#29. When one runs with the wolves, one must howl with the pack.
Leon Trotsky
#30. The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship [in the Soviet Union], if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture.
Leon Trotsky
#31. Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies.
Leon Trotsky
#32. The fundamental flaw of vulgar thought lies in the fact that it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of a reality which consists of eternal motion.
Leon Trotsky
#33. With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in "giving a hiding" to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing them to recognize the new order and to submit to it.
Leon Trotsky
#35. Let us not forget that revolutions are accomplished through people, although they be nameless. Materialism does not ignore the feeling, thinking, and acting man, but explains him.
Leon Trotsky
#36. For the first time in world history the peasant was destined to find a leader in the person of the worker. In that lies the fundamental, and you may say the whole, difference between the Russian Revolution and all those preceding it. In
Leon Trotsky
#37. If you cannot convince a Fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement.
Leon Trotsky
#38. Capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling.
Leon Trotsky
#39. I was not prepared to play the role of singer in the camp of the warriors
Leon Trotsky
#40. Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.
Leon Trotsky
#41. Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one's own and that of other people.
Leon Trotsky
#42. Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.
Leon Trotsky
#43. Between his consciousness and events stood always that impenetrable medium - indifference.
Leon Trotsky
#44. Against my protests a mausoleum was built on the Red Square, a monument unbecoming and offensive to the revolutionary consciousness.
Leon Trotsky
#45. All the parties of capitalist society, all its moralists and all its sycophants will perish beneath the debris of the impending catastrophe. The only party that will survive is the party of the world socialist revolution ...
Leon Trotsky
#46. The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.
Leon Trotsky
#47. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only 'ripened'; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.
Leon Trotsky
#48. Nowhere else did repressions, purges, suppressions, and all other kinds of bureaucratic hooliganism in general acquire such horrifying scope as in Ukraine, in the struggle against powerful forces concealed in the Ukrainian masses that desired more freedom and independence.
Leon Trotsky
#49. Communism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen.
Leon Trotsky
#50. The United States is not only the strongest, but also the most terrified country.
Leon Trotsky
#51. As long as human labor power, and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the "sacredness of human life" remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains.
Leon Trotsky
#52. You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
Leon Trotsky
#53. In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.
Leon Trotsky
#54. You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on - into the dustbin of history!
Leon Trotsky
#55. In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.
Leon Trotsky
#56. England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.
Leon Trotsky
#57. Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.
Leon Trotsky
#58. Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps ... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service.
Leon Trotsky
#59. There is a limit to the application of democratic methods. You can inquire of all the passengers as to what type of car they like to ride in, but it is impossible to question them as to whether to apply the brakes when the train is at full speed and accident threatens.
Leon Trotsky
#60. It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics.
Leon Trotsky
#61. There is no justice in bureaucracy for the individual, for bureaucracy caters only to itself. One cannot practice the same bureaucracy as one is fighting against.
Leon Trotsky
#62. The struggle against war and its social source, capitalism, presupposes direct, active, unequivocal support to the oppressed colonial peoples in their struggles and wars against imperialism. A 'neutral' position is tantamount to support of imperialism.
Leon Trotsky
#63. Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.
Leon Trotsky
#64. City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.
Leon Trotsky
#65. Revolution is impossible until it's inevitable.
Leon Trotsky
#66. If we had had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.
Leon Trotsky
#67. Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man.
Leon Trotsky
#68. The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces - in nature, in society, in man himself.
Leon Trotsky
#70. The usages and methods of warfare are thus determined by changing circumstances and, therefore, they themselves can in nowise be eternal.
Leon Trotsky
#71. There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.
Leon Trotsky
#72. Without a guiding organization, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam.
Leon Trotsky
#73. Slavophilism, the messianism of backwardness, has based its philosophy upon the assumption that the Russian people and their church are democratic through and through, whereas official Russia is a German bureaucracy imposed upon them by Peter the Great.
Leon Trotsky
#74. The task of the proletariat is to create a still more powerful fatherland with a far greater power of resistance, the Republican United States of Europe, as the foundation of the United States of the World.
Leon Trotsky
#75. Tell me anyway
Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.
Leon Trotsky
#76. I feel here that this time they have succeeded.
Leon Trotsky
#77. Religions are illogical primitive ignorance. There is nothing as ridiculous and tragic as a religious government.
Leon Trotsky
#78. In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.
Leon Trotsky
#79. Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.
Leon Trotsky
#80. In the meantime, the first characteristic of a really revolutionary party is -- to be able to look reality in the face.
Leon Trotsky
#81. The artist can not serve his struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates the social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.
Leon Trotsky
#82. The war produced a dreadful desolation in the underground movement. After the arrest of the Duma faction, the Bolsheviks had no centralized party organization at all. The local committees had an episodic existence, and often had no connections with the workers' districts.
Leon Trotsky
#83. A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.
Leon Trotsky
#84. The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls 'inspiration.'
Leon Trotsky
#85. If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the "mirror" of literature?
Leon Trotsky
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