Leon Trotsky Quotes
-
In Stalin each Soviet bureaucrat easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.
-
Nowhere else did repressions, purges, suppressions, and all other kinds of bureaucratic hooliganism in general acquire such horrifying scope as in Ukraine, in the struggle against powerful forces concealed in the Ukrainian masses that desired more freedom and independence.
-
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.
-
For the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the efforts of one country are sufficient - for this we have the testimony of the history of our revolution. For the definitive victory of Socialism, for the organization of Socialist production, the efforts of one country, especially of a peasant country like Russia, are insufficient - for that are required the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries.
-
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.
-
Dialectical thought is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion.
-
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.
-
Communism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen.
-
Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.
-
Repression for the attainment of economic ends is a necessary weapon of the socialist dictatorship.
-
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 The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.
-
A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.
-
Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.
-
In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their own powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who someday will come and accomplish his mission.
-
The dictatorship of the Communist Party is maintained by recourse to every form of violence.
-
We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right... And if the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I shall support the consequences of the decision to the end.
-
Terror, as the demonstration of the will and strength of the working class, is historically justified, precisely because the proletariat was able thereby to break the political will of the intelligentsia, pacify the professional man of various categories and work, and gradually subordinate them to its own aims within the field of their specialties.
-
Where the sole employer is the state, [opposition] means death by slow starvation.
-
Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above these heights, new peaks will rise.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The life of a revolutionary would be quite impossible without a certain amount of 'fatalism.'
-
It is quite clear that the German and Chinese revolutions in case of victory would have changed the face of Europe and Asia, and perhaps of the whole world.
-
The concrete is a combination of abstractions - not an arbitrary or subjective combination but one that corresponds to the laws of the movement of a given phenomenon.