Leon Trotsky quotes
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“Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the Civil War. A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“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 -
“Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
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“To renounce the conquest of power is voluntarily to leave the power with those who wield it, the exploiters. The essence of every revolution consisted and consists in putting a new class in power, thus enabling it to realize its own program in life. It is impossible to wage war and to reject victory.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“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 -
“Everyone has a right to be stupid, but Comrade McDonald abuses the privilege.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
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“Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravity.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.”
-- Leon TrotskySource : "When It Comes to Personal Transformation, Could the Ends Be the Means?" by Russell Bishop, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 9, 2011.
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“Religions are illogical primitive ignorance. There is nothing as ridiculous and tragic as a religious government.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
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“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 -
“Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“As a general rule, man strives to avoid labor. Love for work is not at all an inborn characteristic: it is created by economic pressure and social education. One may even say that man is a fairly lazy animal. It is on this quality, in reality, that is founded to a considerable extent all human progress; because if man did not strive to expend his energy economically, did not seek to receive the largest possible quantity of products in return for a small quantity of energy, there would have been no technical development or social culture.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
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“As long as I breathe I hope. As long as I breathe I shall fight for the future, that radiant future, in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and happiness! Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”
-- Leon TrotskySource : Leon Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher (1964). “The age of permanent revolution: a Trotsky anthology”
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“There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.”
-- Leon TrotskySource : Leon Trotsky (2007). “My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography”, p.429, Courier Corporation
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“Tell me anyway--Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“‎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 -
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“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 -
“If we had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“Insurrection is an art, and like all arts has its own laws.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
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“Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“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 -
“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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“The boycott of parliamentary institutions on the part of anarchists and semianarchists is dictated by a desire not to submit their weakness to a test on the part of the masses, thus preserving their right to an inactive hauteur which makes no difference to anybody. A revolutionary party can turn its back to a parliament only if it has set itself the immediate task of overthrowing the existing regime.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“Similar (of course, far from identical) irritations in similar conditions call out similar reflexes; the more powerful the irritation, the sooner it overcomes personal peculiarities. To a tickle, people react differently, but to a red-hot iron, alike. As a steam-hammer converts a sphere and a cube alike into sheet metal, so under the blow of too great and inexorable events resistances are smashed and the boundaries of "individuality" lost.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It "knows" who is to get something and who has to wait.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“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 -
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“A program of "disarmament," while imperialist antagonisms survive, is the most pernicious of fictions. Even if it were realized by way of general agreement - an obviously fantastic assumption!- that would by no means prevent a new war. The imperialists do not make war because there are armaments; on the contrary, they forge arms when they need to fight.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“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 -
“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 -
“From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
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“Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely.”
-- Leon TrotskySource : What Next? (1932) ch. 14
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“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 -
“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 -
“You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
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“Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above these heights, new peaks will rise.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“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 TrotskySource : Leon Trotsky (2000). “Their Morals and Ours: The Marxist View of Morality”, p.49, Resistance Books
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“Communism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“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 -
“Under all conditions, well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points.”
-- Leon TrotskySource : Leon Trotsky (1967). “Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence”, New York : Stein and Day
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“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 -
“The United States is not only the strongest, but also the most terrified country.”
-- Leon TrotskySource : Leon Trotsky (2012). “My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography”, p.579, Courier Corporation
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“...capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“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 -
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“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 TrotskySource : "Trotzky's Diary in Exile - 1935". Book by Leon Trotsky, 1958.
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“I feel here that this time they have succeeded.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“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 -
“The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls 'inspiration.'”
-- Leon Trotsky -
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“The slanders poured down like Niagara. If you take into consideration the setting - the war and the revolution - and the character of the accused - revolutionary leaders of millions who were conducting their party to the sovereign power - you can say without exaggeration that July 1917 was the month of the most gigantic slander in world history.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“He who slanders the victim aids the executioner.”
-- Leon TrotskySource : Leon Trotsky (2000). “Their Morals and Ours: The Marxist View of Morality”, p.23, Resistance Books
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“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 TrotskySource : Leon Trotsky, Slavoj Žižek, Henry Noel Brailsford (2007). “Terrorism and communism: a reply to Karl Kautsky”, Verso Books
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“As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the sacredness of human life.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
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“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 -
“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 -
“The bourgeoisie, which far surpasses the proletariat in the completeness and irreconcilibility of its class consciousness, is vitally interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited masses. It is exactly for this purpose that the concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions...The appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophic mistake but a necessary element in the mechanics of class deception.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“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 -
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“Workers – men and women – of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory!”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“Against my protests a mausoleum was built on the Red Square, a monument unbecoming and offensive to the revolutionary consciousness.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
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“Actually, the decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this summary justice showed the world that we would continue to fight mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar's family was needed not only in order to frighten, horrify, and dishearten the enemy but also in order to shake up our own ranks, to show them that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either complete victory or complete ruin.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“Transcending class distinctions, the speaker [Stalin] portrays the relation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as a mere division of labor. The workers and soldiers achieve the revolution, Guchkov and Miliukov "fortify" it.[...] This superintendent's approach to the historical process is exactly characteristic of the leaders of Menshevism, this handing out of instructions to various classes and then patronizingly criticizing their fulfillment.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“If you cannot convince a Fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
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“Where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“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 -
“The Federated Republic of Europe-the United States of Europe-that is what must be. National autonomy no longer suffices. Economic evolution demands the abolition of national frontiers. If Europe is to remain split into national groups, then Imperialism will recommence its work. Only a Federated Republic of Europe can give peace to the world.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
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“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 -
“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 TrotskySource : Leon Trotsky (1937). “The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and where is it Going?”, p.241, Mehring Books
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“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 -
“The dictatorship of the Communist Party is maintained by recourse to every form of violence.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
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“Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures. Everything is better than some things and worse than others. Which you choose to compare your experiences and situation with determines whether you will be happy and grateful or sad and jealous.”
-- Leon Trotsky -
“Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service.”
-- Leon TrotskySource : "Trotsky : The Eternal Revolutionary" Dmitri Volkogonov, (p. 213), 1996.
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