Leon Trotsky Quotes
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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 party's most outstanding mediocrity.
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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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Our differences with [Joseph] Stalin are entirely of a strategical character.
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The Soviet Union bureaucracy not only has not disappeared, yielding its place to the masses, but has turned into an uncontrolled force dominating the masses.
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Tell me anyway--Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.
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Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.
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The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.
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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.
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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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Insurrection is an art, and like all arts has its own laws.
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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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Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.
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Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.
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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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From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.
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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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Once again, he who ignores the problems of revolutionary strategy would do better not to talk about revolutions at all.
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Under all conditions, well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points.
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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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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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National self-sufficiency or "autarchy" is the ideal of [Adolf] Hitler, not of [Karl] Marx and [Vladimir] Lenin.
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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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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.