Leon Trotsky Quotes
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I emphasized the significance of revolutionary strategy.
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Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.
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Independent character is like independent thought, it cannot be developed without criticism.
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The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.
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Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravity.
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Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.
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Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.
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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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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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Tell me anyway--Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.
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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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Insurrection is an art, and like all arts has its own laws.
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From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.
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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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...capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling.
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Our differences with [Joseph] Stalin are entirely of a strategical character.
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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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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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Under all conditions, well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points.
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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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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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Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction...
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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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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.