Leon Trotsky Quotes

78 quotes in 1224 categories

• Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely.
• Under all conditions, well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points.
• In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.
• 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…
• I feel here that this time they have succeeded.
• Communism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen.
• 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…
• You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on - into the dustbin of…
• The slanders poured down like Niagara. If you take into consideration the setting - the war and the revolution - and the character of the…
• 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…
• Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever.
• The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls 'inspiration.'
• 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…
• 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…
• A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.
• Against my protests a mausoleum was built on the Red Square, a monument unbecoming and offensive to the revolutionary consciousness.
• Fascism is a caricature of Jacobinism.
• 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…
• 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…
• Where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation

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