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As long as I breathe I hope. As long as I breathe I shall fight for the future, that radiant future, in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and happiness!
Leon Trotsky -
If you cannot convince a Fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement.
Leon Trotsky
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Everyone has a right to be stupid, but Comrade MacDonald abuses the privilege.
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 this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.
Leon Trotsky -
Stalinism and fascism, in spite of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of their features they show a deadly similarity.
Leon Trotsky -
It would be childish to think that the Stalin bureaucracy can be removed by means of a Party or Soviet Congress. Normal, constitutional means are no longer available for the removal of the ruling clique ... They can be compelled to hand over power to the Proletarian vanguard only by FORCE.
Leon Trotsky -
Let us not forget that revolutions are accomplished through people, although they be nameless. Materialism does not ignore the feeling, thinking, and acting man, but explains him.
Leon Trotsky -
The German soldiers, that is, the workers and peasants, will in the majority of cases have far more sympathy for the vanquished peoples than for their own ruling caste. The necessity to act at every step in the capacity of 'pacifiers' and oppressors will swiftly disintegrate the armies of occupation, infecting them with a revolutionary spirit.
Leon Trotsky
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Yet the proletariat has not only a vanguard, but also a rearguard, and besides the proletariat there are the peasantry and the bureaucracy.
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 -
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 -
As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the sacredness of human life.
Leon Trotsky -
Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely.
Leon Trotsky -
It was as the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himself rose to his position.
Leon Trotsky
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The United States is not only the strongest, but also the most terrified country.
Leon Trotsky -
Both Hitler and Mussolini have plagiarized and imitated practically everything from everyone. Mussolini stole from the Bolsheviks and from Gabriele D’Annunzio, and found inspiration in the camp of big business. Hitler imitated the Bolsheviks and Mussolini.
Leon Trotsky -
Repression for the attainment of economic ends is a necessary weapon of the socialist dictatorship.
Leon Trotsky -
A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.
Leon Trotsky -
In not more than a month’s time terror will assume very violent forms, after the example of the great French Revolution; the guillotine... will be ready for our enemies... that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which makes man shorter by a head.
Leon Trotsky -
Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.
Leon Trotsky
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Can and must! The proclamation of this new conception of [Joseph Stalin] is closed by the same words, "Such are in general the characteristic features of Lenin's conception of the proletarian revolution." In the course of a single year Stalin ascribed to [Vladimir] Lenin two directly opposed conceptions of the fundamental question of socialism. The first version represents the real tradition of the party; the second took shape in Stalin's mind only after the death of Lenin, in the course of the struggle against "Trotskyism".
Leon Trotsky -
Communism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen.
Leon Trotsky -
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 -
In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.
Leon Trotsky