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 TROTSKYOnce again, he who ignores the problems of revolutionary strategy would do better not to talk about revolutions at all.
More Leon Trotsky Quotes
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If we close our eyes to the dark sides of the workers’ State which we have helped to create, we shall never reach socialism.
LEON TROTSKY -
Root out the counter revolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps… Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service.
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 -
In the appendix to my History of the Russian Revolution I give a detailed and documented study of the ideas of the Bolshevik party on the October revolution. This study, I hope, will make it impossible in the future to ascribe to [Vladimir] Lenin the theory of Socialism in a single country.
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 -
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 -
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 -
Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravity.
LEON TROTSKY -
The pillars of Hercules of the United States are vulgarity and stupidity.
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 -
There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.
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 -
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 -
When one runs with the wolves, one must howl with the pack.
LEON TROTSKY -
The revenge of history is more powerful than the revenge of the most powerful General Secretary.
LEON TROTSKY -
Revolutionary realism tries to draw the maximum advantage from every situation – that is what makes it revolutionary – but at the same time it does not permit us to set ourselves fantastic aims – that is what makes it realistic.
LEON TROTSKY -
Once again, he who ignores the problems of revolutionary strategy would do better not to talk about revolutions at all.
LEON TROTSKY -
The dictatorship of the Communist Party is maintained by recourse to every form of violence.
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 -
Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever.
LEON TROTSKY -
Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely.
LEON TROTSKY -
Under all conditions, well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points.
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 -
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 -
From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.
LEON TROTSKY -
Our party’s most outstanding mediocrity.
LEON TROTSKY