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 TROTSKYEveryone has a right to be stupid, but Comrade MacDonald abuses the privilege.
More Leon Trotsky Quotes
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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 -
Where the sole employer is the state, [opposition] means death by slow starvation.
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 -
Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.
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 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 -
The revolution has its own laws: in the period of its culmination it pushes the most highly developed, determined and far-seeing stratum of the revolutionary class to the most advanced positions.
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 -
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 -
Capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling.
LEON TROTSKY -
Revolutions are always verbose.
LEON TROTSKY -
I feel here that this time they have succeeded.
LEON TROTSKY -
Communism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen.
LEON TROTSKY -
In 1917 there was not a single Bolshevik who considered possible the realization of a socialist society in a single country, and least of all in Russia.
LEON TROTSKY -
Against my protests a mausoleum was built on the Red Square, a monument unbecoming and offensive to the revolutionary consciousness.
LEON TROTSKY