Leon Trotsky Quotes

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

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

Insurrection is an art, and like all arts has its own laws. ~ Leon Trotsky

Tell me anyway
Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies. ~ Leon Trotsky

Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravity. ~ 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

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

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

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 you walk into a coffee shop in 1903 Vienna, you might find at the same table the artist Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky and possibly Adolf Hitler, who lived in Vienna at the same time. ~ Eric Weiner

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

Every historical form of society is in its foundation a form of organization of labor. While every previous form of society was an organization of labor in the interests of a minority, which organized its State apparatus for the oppression of the overwhelming majority of the workers, we are making the first attempt in world history to organize labor in the interests of the laboring majority itself. ~ 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

The so-called "breeding" of the tsar, his ability to control himself in the most extraordinary circumstances, cannot be explained by a mere external training; its essence was an inner indifference, a poverty of spiritual forces, a weakness of the impulses of the will. That mask of indifference which was called breeding in certain circles, was a natural part of Nicholas at birth. The ~ Leon Trotsky

Between his consciousness and events stood always that impenetrable medium - indifference. ~ Leon Trotsky

Capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling. ~ Leon Trotsky

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

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

On December 13, the tsarina suggests to the tsar: "Anything but this responsible ministry about which everybody has gone crazy. Everything is getting quiet and better, but people want to feel your hand. How long they have been saying to me, for whole years, the same thing: 'Russia loves to feel the whip.' That is their nature!" This orthodox Hessian, with a Windsor upbringing and a Byzantine crown on her head, not only "incarnates" the Russian soul, but also organically despises it. Their nature demands the whip - writes the Russian tsarina to the Russian tsar about the Russian people, just two months and a half before the monarchy tips over into the abyss. In ~ Leon Trotsky

Wild Times
Since Mexico accepted communism as a legitimate political party during the 1920's and allowed refugees greater flexibility of thought, it became a haven from persecution. Moreover, living in Mexico was less costly than most countries, the weather was usually sunny and no one objected to the swinging lifestyle that many of the expats engaged in. It was for these reasons that Julio Mella from Cuba, Leon Trotsky from Russia and others sought refuge there. It also attracted many actors, authors and artists from the United States, many of whom were Communist or, at the very least were "Fellow Travelers" and had leftist leanings. Although the stated basic reason for the Communist Party's existence was to improve conditions for the working class, it became a hub for the avant-garde, who felt liberated socially as well as politically. The bohemian enclave of Coyoacán now a part of Mexico City, where Frida Kahlo was born, was located just east of San Angel which at the time was a district of the ever expanding City. It also became the gathering place for personalities such as the American actor Orson Welles, the beautiful actress Dolores del Río, the famous artist Diego Rivera and his soon-to-be-wife, "Frida," who became and is still revered as the illustrious matriarch of Mexico. ~ Hank Bracker

The Bund (Jewish) is free not to trust the party, but it cannot expect the party to vote no confidence in its own self. ~ Leon Trotsky

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 comparison of Rasputin and Christ was customary in that circle, and by no means accidental. The alarm of the royal couple before the menacing forces of history was too sharp to be satisfied with an impersonal God and the futile shadow of a Biblical Christ. They needed a second coming of "the Son of Man." In Rasputin the rejected and agonizing monarchy found a Christ in its own image. "If there had been no Rasputin," said Senator Tagantsev, a man of the old regime, "it would have been necessary to invent one." There is a good deal more in these words than their author imagined. ~ 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

The motive force of history is truth and not lies. ~ Leon Trotsky

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

The bourgeoisie ... by its imperialist methods of appropriation is destroying the economic structure of the world and human culture generally. Nevertheless, the historical persistence of the bourgeoisie is colossal. It holds power, and does not wish to abandon it ... The red terror is a weapon utilised against a class, doomed to destruction which does not wish to perish. ~ Leon Trotsky

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

As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the "sacredness of human life". We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred, we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And that problem can only be solved by blood and iron. The man who recognizes the revolutionary historic importance of the very fact of the existence of the Soviet system must also sanction the Red Terror. ~ 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

Thousands and thousands of books are thrown on the market every year
presenting some new variant of the personal romance, some tale of the vacillations
of the melancholic or the career of the ambitious. The heroine of Proust requires
several finely-wrought pages in order to feel that she does not feel anything. It
would seem that one might, at least with equal justice, demand attention to a
series of collective historic dramas which lifted hundreds of millions of human
beings out of nonexistence, transforming the character of nations and intruding
forever into the life of all mankind. ~ Leon Trotsky

Trotsky was so much an intellectual that in the final analysis, Marxism was not quite enough for him. ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

The dictatorship of the Communist Party is maintained by recourse to every form of violence. ~ Leon Trotsky

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

Revolutions are always verbose. ~ Leon Trotsky

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

Culture feeds on the sap of economics, and a material surplus is necessary, so that culture may grow, develop and become subtle. ~ Leon Trotsky

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

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

Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever. ~ Leon Trotsky

My favourite author is Leon Trotsky - the political philosophy and the way he writes is beautiful, and really relevant, too. ~ Andrej Pejic

When one runs with the wolves, one must howl with the pack. ~ Leon Trotsky

Religions are illogical primitive ignorance. There is nothing as ridiculous and tragic as a religious government. ~ Leon Trotsky

The first days of war were the first days of disgrace. After a series of partial catastrophes, in the spring of 1915 came the general retreat. The generals took out their own criminal incapacity on the peaceful population. Enormous tracts of land were violently laid waste. Clouds of human locusts were driven to the rear with whips. The external rout was completed with an internal one. ~ Leon Trotsky

The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy. ~ Isaac Deutscher

A revolution is always distinguished by impoliteness, probably because the ruling classes did not take the trouble in good season to teach the people fine manners. ~ 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

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

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

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

The superannuated anarchist Kropotkin, made use of the war to disavow everything he had been teaching for almost half a century. This denouncer of the state supported the Entente, and if he denounced the dual power in Russia, it was not in the name of anarchy, but in the name of a single core of the bourgeoisie. ~ Leon Trotsky

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

We seek to uncover
behind the events changes in the collective consciousness. We reject wholesale references to the "spontaneity" of the movement, references which in most cases
explain nothing and teach nobody. Revolutions take place according to certain laws. This does not mean that the masses in action are aware of the laws of revolution, but it does mean that the changes in mass consciousness are not accidental, but are subject to an objective necessity which is capable of theoretic explanation, and thus makes both prophecy and leadership possible. ~ Leon Trotsky

Terror is a powerful means of policy and one would have to be a hypocrite not to understand this. ~ Leon Trotsky

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

Literature without the power of great synthesis is the symptom of social weariness and is characteristic of sharply transitional epochs. ~ Leon Trotsky

He who thinks of renouncing "physical" struggle must renounce all struggle, for the spirit does not live without the flesh. ~ Leon Trotsky

Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it. ~ 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

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

There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances. ~ Leon Trotsky

Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies. ~ Leon Trotsky

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

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end. ~ Leon Trotsky

Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege. ~ Leon Trotsky

The local liberal press, much molested by the censorship, had its courageous and skilful writers such as VM Doroshevich, the master of that semi-literary and semi-journalistic essay at which Bronstein himself was one day to excel. ~ Isaac Deutscher

Here's to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy! ~ C. Wright Mills

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

Where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation ~ Leon Trotsky

Our party's most outstanding mediocrity. ~ 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 Trotsky

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

Revolution is impossible until it's inevitable. ~ 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

Terror, as the demonstration of the will and strength of the working class, is historically justified, precisely because the proletariat was able thereby to break the political will of the intelligentsia, pacify the professional man of various categories and work, and gradually subordinate them to its own aims within the field of their specialties. ~ 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

Fascism is a caricature of Jacobinism. ~ Leon Trotsky

You must remember that the political development of the masses proceeds not in a direct line, but in a complicated curve. And is not this, after all, the essential movement of every material process? Objective conditions were powerfully impelling the workers, soldiers and peasants toward the banners of the Bolsheviks, but the masses were entering upon this path in a state of struggle with their own past, with their yesterday's beliefs, and partly also with their beliefs of today. At a difficult turn, at a moment of failure and disappointment, the old prejudices not yet burnt out would flare up, and the enemy would naturally seize upon these as upon an anchor of
salvation. ~ 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

Communism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen. ~ Leon Trotsky

The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls 'inspiration.' ~ Leon Trotsky

If the parliamentary regime, even in the period of "peaceful", stable development, was a rather crude method of discovering the opinion of the country, and in the epoch of revolutionary storm completely lost its capacity to follow the course of the struggle and the development of revolutionary consciousness, the Soviet regime, which is more closely, straightly, honestly bound up with the toiling majority of the people, does achieve meaning, not in statically reflecting a majority, but in dynamically creating it. ~ Leon Trotsky

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

The principles of liberalism can have a real existence only in conjunction with a police system. Anarchism is an attempt to cleanse liberalism of the police. But just as pure oxygen is impossible to breathe, so liberalism without the police principle means the death of society. Being a shadow-caricature of liberalism, anarchism as a whole has shared its fate. Having killed liberalism, the development of class contradictions has also killed anarchism. Like every sect which founds its teaching not upon the actual development of human society, but upon the reduction to absurdity of one of its features, anarchism explodes like a soap bubble at that moment when the social contradictions arrive at the point of war or revolution. ~ Leon Trotsky

Everyone has a right to be stupid, but Comrade McDonald abuses the privilege. ~ Leon Trotsky

If you cannot convince a Fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement. ~ Leon Trotsky

Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps ... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service. ~ Leon Trotsky

In the meantime, the first characteristic of a really revolutionary party is -- to be able to look reality in the face. ~ 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

All buildings, large or small, public or private, have a public face, a facade; they therefore, without exception, have a positive or negative effect on the quality of the public realm, enriching or impoverishing it in a lasting and radical manner. The architecture of the city and public space is a matter of common concern to the same degree as laws and language - they are the foundation of civility and civilisation. ~ Leon Krier

When it comes to personal relationships, there is no greater way to express your commitment or to display your trustwor- thiness than to devote your life to the people you love. ~ Leon Hayduchok

You don't deploy forces into harm's way without knowing what's going on. ~ Leon Panetta

The university is the last remaining platform for national dissent. ~ Leon Eisenberg

Trotsky rises to give me his hand, then sits at his desk, gently allowing his regard to light on my person. ~ Georges Simenon

Since 1787 the principle of freedom of religion has been attacked but never overthrown. Keeping education in the United States free of sectarian influence has long been one of the primary struggles of believers in freedom of religion. ~ Joseph Leon Blau

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Both of them had always taken delight in this most wonderful of holdovers from the academic Stone Age, the fact that the rector of the university was addressed as "Il Magnifico Rettore," the only thing Brunetti had learned in twenty years on the fringes of the university that had managed to make academic life sound interesting to him. ~ Donna Leon

Especially in the world today, where science rightfully is so important in terms of technology, innovation, telecom, Internet, fighting diseases, I think it's equally important that poetry and painting have their share of support. ~ Leon Black