Leon Trotsky Quotes
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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.
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The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.
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Only the defeat of the proletariat in Germany in 1923 gave the decisive push to the creation of Stalin's theory of national socialism: the downward curve of the revolution gave rise to Stalinism, not to the theory of the permanent revolution, which was first formulated by me in 1905. This theory is not bound to a definite calendar of revolutionary events; it only reveals the world-wide interdependence of the revolutionary process.
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Having rationalized his economic syste, that is, having saturated it with consciousness and planfulness, man will not leave a trace of the present stagnant and worm-eaten domestic life.
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In Russia itself the proletariat conquered in spite of the fact that there was no Soviet State in existence at the time elsewhere. For the victory are necessary, not only certain objective conditions, internal as well as external, but also certain subjective factors - the Party, the leadership, the strategy.
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Tell me anyway--Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.
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Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravity.
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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 itself for the organization, and, finally, a dictator substitutes himself for the central committee.
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Our differences with [Joseph] Stalin are entirely of a strategical character.
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Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.
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From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.
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Insurrection is an art, and like all arts has its own laws.
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...capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling.
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Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.
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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.
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Under all conditions, well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points.
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If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.
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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 means prevent a new war. The imperialists do not make war because there are armaments; on the contrary, they forge arms when they need to fight.
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Once again, he who ignores the problems of revolutionary strategy would do better not to talk about revolutions at all.
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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.
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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 eternal motion.
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Look back at history - those who guided the revolution in the time of its culmination never kept their leading positions long after the turning point.
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Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction...
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It is therefore not true that the mere existence of the Soviet Union is capable of assuring the victory of the revolution in other countries.