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Top Leon Trotsky Quotes

Browse top 44 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Leon Trotsky.

Favorite Leon Trotsky Quotes

1. "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
2. "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 meansprevent a new war. The imperialists do not make war because there are armaments; on the contrary, they forgearms when they need to fight." ~ Leon Trotsky
3. "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
4. "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
5. "Fascism is a caricature of Jacobinism." ~ Leon Trotsky
6. "We seek to uncoverbehind the events changes in the collective consciousness. We reject wholesale references to the "spontaneity" of the movement, references which in most casesexplain 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
7. "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
8. "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
9. "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
10. "From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality." ~ Leon Trotsky
11. "Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it." ~ Leon Trotsky
12. "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
13. "A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified." ~ Leon Trotsky
14. "Tell me anyway--Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies." ~ Leon Trotsky
15. "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
16. "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
17. "?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
18. "Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack." ~ Leon Trotsky
19. "...capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling." ~ Leon Trotsky
20. "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
21. "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
22. "An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death-penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements—the animals that we call men—will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear. And yet armies are not built on fear. The Tsar's army fell to pieces not because of any lack of reprisals. In his attempt to save it by restoring the death-penalty, Kerensky only finished it. Upon the ashes of the great war, the Bolsheviks created a new army. These facts demand no explanation for any one who has even the slightest knowledge of the language of history. The strongest cement in the new army was the ideas of the October revolution, and the train supplied the front with this cement." ~ Leon Trotsky
23. "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
24. "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
25. "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
26. "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
27. "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
28. "Lenin refused to recognise moral norms established by slave-owners for their slaves and never observed by the slave-owners themselves; he called upon the Proletariat to extend the class struggle into the moral sphere too. Who fawns before the precepts established by the enemy will never vanquish that enemy!" ~ Leon Trotsky
29. "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
30. "The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end." ~ Leon Trotsky
31. "There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances." ~ Leon Trotsky
32. "You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you." ~ Leon Trotsky
33. "Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction." ~ Leon Trotsky
34. "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
35. "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
36. "Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravity." ~ Leon Trotsky
37. "In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time." ~ Leon Trotsky
38. "Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man." ~ Leon Trotsky
39. "Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies." ~ Leon Trotsky
40. "Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever." ~ Leon Trotsky
41. "If we had had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes." ~ Leon Trotsky
42. "Insurrection is an art, and like all arts has its own laws." ~ Leon Trotsky
43. "Thousands and thousands of books are thrown on the market every yearpresenting some new variant of the personal romance, some tale of the vacillationsof the melancholic or the career of the ambitious. The heroine of Proust requiresseveral finely-wrought pages in order to feel that she does not feel anything. Itwould seem that one might, at least with equal justice, demand attention to aseries of collective historic dramas which lifted hundreds of millions of humanbeings out of nonexistence, transforming the character of nations and intrudingforever into the life of all mankind." ~ Leon Trotsky
44. "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

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Today's Quote

When a man I like touches my arm or my hair, I want to know if he'll touch the center of me, and whatever I learned in school--I went to school for a long time--I seem to believe that my center can be reached best with the tip of a penis...."
Author: Alice Mattison

What Did Leon Trotsky Talk About?

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