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Leon Trotsky

107 quotes

• “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 (1879–1940) first seen 1879 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On Optimism and Pessimism, on the Twentieth Century, and on Many Other Things" (1901), as quoted in The Prophet Armed : Trotsky, 1879-1921 (2003) by Isaac Deutscher , p. 45

• “Lenin's methods [of "hard" centralism and mistrust of the working class] lead 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. … The party must seek the guarantee of its stability in its own base, in an active and self-reliant proletariat, and not in its top caucus … which the revolution may suddenly sweep away with its wing.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1904 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Our Political Tasks" (1904), as quoted in The Prophet Armed (1963) by Isaac Deutscher

• “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.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1909 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Why Marxists oppose Individual Terrorism, article published in the Austrian Social Democratic paper Der Kampf (1909)

• “Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Statement of 1918, as quoted in Trotsky : The Eternal Revolutionary (1996) by Dmitri Volkogonov, p. 213

• “Capital was really safer in Russia than anywhere else. ... No true Marxist would allow sentiment to interfere with business.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: During a 1921 meeting with American businessman Armand Hammer, as quoted in Hammer: Witness to History by Hammer and Neil Lyndon (1988), p. 160

• “Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1924 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Literature and Revolution (1924)

• “Lenin cannot be chopped up into quotations suited for every possible case, because for Lenin the formula never stands higher than the reality; it is always the tool that makes it possible to grasp the reality and to dominate it. It would not be hard to find in Lenin dozens and hundreds of passages which, formally speaking, seem to be contradictory. But what must be seen is not the formal relationship of one passage to another, but the real relationship of each of them to the concrete reality in which the formula was introduced as a lever. The Leninist truth is always concrete!”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1924 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The New Course (1924)

• “Leninism is warlike from head to foot. War is impossible without cunning, without subterfuge. without deception of the enemy. Victorious war cunning is a constituent element of Leninist politics. But at the same time, Leninism is supreme revolutionary honesty toward the party and the working class. It admits of no fiction, no bubble-blowing, no pseudo-grandeur.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1924 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The New Course (1924)

• “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.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1924 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech at the XIIIth Party Congress (May 1924)

• “Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction; from the point of view of the proletariat the difference between the types of reaction is meaningless.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: What Next? (1932)

• “Economic accounting is unthinkable without market relations.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Soviet Economy in Danger (October 1932)

• “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 (1879–1940) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Bulletin of the Opposition, October 1933. Quote from Harpal Brar's Trotskyism or Leninism? p. 625

• “The peasantry, having lifted itself up out of its medieval status, cannot politically generate its own rage.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech in Paris (1934)

• “The tactical, or if you will, “technical,” task was quite simple — grab every fascist or every isolated group of fascists by their collars, acquaint them with the pavement a few times, strip them of their fascist insignia and documents, and without carrying things any further, leave them with their fright and a few good black and blue marks.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Ultraleft Tactics in Fighting the Fascists (March 1934)

• “The struggle against war, properly understood and executed, presupposes the uncompromising hostility of the proletariat and its organizations, always and everywhere, toward its own and every other imperialist bourgeoisie...”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Resolution on the Antiwar Congress of the London Bureau" (July 1936)

• “The struggle against war and its social source, capitalism, presupposes direct, active, unequivocal support to the oppressed colonial peoples in their struggles and wars against imperialism. A 'neutral' position is tantamount to support of imperialism.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Resolution on the Antiwar Congress of the London Bureau" (July 1936)

• “Inside the Party, Stalin has put himself above all criticism and the State. It is impossible to displace him except by assassination. Every oppositionist becomes ipso facto a terrorist.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Statement from interview with New York Evening Journal (26 January 1937), as quoted in Trotskyism or Leninism? (1993) by Harpal Brar p. 625

• “A sledgehammer breaks glass but forges steel.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: We do not change our course" (1938)

• “Stalin's secret police, the GPU (NKVD), has fall to the same level of the Nazi Gestapo.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Behind The Moscow Trial", Trotsky in Mexico, 1939

• “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 (1879–1940) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Manuscript from 1940, as translated in Writings of Leon Trotsky‎ edited by George Breitman

• “An ally has to be watched just like an enemy.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-67 (1974) by Adam Bruno Ulam

• “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 (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in The Cheka : Lenin's Political Police (1981) by George Leggett, p. 54

• “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 (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence (1941), translated by Charles Malamuth, p. 412

• “The proletariat can only achieve power by relying upon a national upsurge an national enthusiasm. The proletariat will enter the government as the revolutionary representative of the nation, as the recognized national leader in the struggle against absolutism and feudal barbarism. In taking power, however, it will popes a new epoch, an en epoch of revolutionary legislation, of positive policy, and in this connection it cannot at all be sure of retaining the role of the recognized expressor of the will of the nation.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “One thing is clear. Every passing day will deepen the policy of the proletariat in power, and more and more define is class character. Side beside with that, the revolutionary ties between the proletariat and the nation will be broken, the class disintegration of the peasantry will assume political form, and the antagonism between the component sections will grow in proportion as the policy of the workers' government defines itself, ceasing to be a general-democractic and becoming a class policy.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The proletariat, once having taken power, will fight for it to the very end. While one of the weapons in this struggle for the maintenance and the consolidation of power will be agitation and organization, especially in the countryside, another will be a policy of collectivism. Collectivism will become not only the inevitable way forward from the position in which the party in power will find itself, but will also be a means of preserving this position with the support of the proletariat.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “This book was written in 1920 in the car of a military train and amid the flames of the civil war. The circumstance the reader must keep before his eyes if he wishes rightly to understand not only the basic material of the book, but also its harsh allusion, and particularly the tone in which it is written.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The argument which is repeated again and again in criticisms of the Soviet system in Russia, and particularly in criticisms of revolutionary attempts to set up a similar structure in other countries, is the argument based on the balance of power.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The balance of political power at any given moment is determined under the influences of fundamental and secondary factors of differing degrees of effectiveness, and only in its fundamental quality is it determined by the state of the development of production.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The political worshipers of routine, incapable of surveying the historical process in its complexity, in its internal clashes and contradictions, imagined to themselves that history was preparing the way for the Socialist order simultaneously and systematically on all sides, so that concentration of production and the development of a Communist morality in the producer and the consumer mature simultaneously with the electric plough and a parliamentary majority.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The dictatorship is necessary because it is a case, not of partial changes, but of the very existence of the bourgeoisie. No agreement is possible on this ground. Only force can be the deciding factor.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It is only possible to safeguard the supremacy of the working class by forcing the bourgeoisie accustomed to rule, to realize that it is too dangerous an undertaking for it to revolt against the dictatorship of the proletariat, to undermine it by conspiracies, sabotage, insurrections, or the calling in foreign troops.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The Constituent Assembly placed itself across the path of the revolutionary movement, and was swept aside.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It could and must, be explained that in the civil war we destroyed the White Guards in order that they should not destroy the workers. Consequently, our problem is not the destruction of human life, but its preservation. But as we have to struggle for the preservation of human life with arms in our hands, it leads to the destruction of human life - a puzzle the dialectical secret of which was explained by old Hegel, without reckoning other still more ancient sages.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “During war all institutions and organs of the State and of public opinion become, directly or indirectly, weapons of warfare. This is particularly true of the Press. No government carrying on a serious war will allow publications to exist on its territory which, openly or indirectly support the enemy.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In war, where both success and failure are repaid by death, hostile agents who penetrate into the rear are subject to execution. This is inhuman, but no one ever considered war a school of humanity.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “We are fighting. We are fighting a life-and-death struggle. The Press is a weapon not of an abstract society, but of two irreconcilable, armed and contending sides. We are destroying the Press of the counter-revolution, just as we destroyed its fortified positions, its stores, its communications and its intelligence system.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In times of peace, the capitalists used to guarantee their interests by means of the "peaceful" robbery of hired labor. During the war they served those same interests by means of the destruction of countless human lives.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In a revolutionary period, the party which has been thrown from power, which does not reconcile itself with the stability of the ruling class, and which proves this by its desperate struggle against the latter, cannot be terrorized by the threat of imprisonment, as it does not believe in its duration. It is just this simple but decisive fact that explains the widespread recourse to shooting in a civil war.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “No one yet has learned to drive a locomotive sitting in his study.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Repression for the attainment of economic ends is a necessary weapon of the socialist dictatorship.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the state … Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Terror can be very efficient against a reactionary class which does not want to leave the scene of operations. Intimidation is a powerful weapon of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon intimidation.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “We communists know only one possession that is sacred — the life of the working man, the life of the worker, his wife and his children. That is the only possession which is sacred so far as we are concerned, and it gives us the right to do anything and everything.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “We Marxist communists are profoundly opposed to the anarchist doctrine. This doctrine is erroneous”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I will say in a few words why the anarchist doctrine is wrong. The anarchists say that the working class does not need a government: what is needs is to organize production. Government, they say, is a bourgeois invention, a bourgeois machine of compulsion, and the working class does not need to take governmental power. This is wrong from beginning to end.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Having rationalized his economic system, that is, having saturated it with consciousness and planfulness, man will not leave a trace of the present stagnant and worm-eaten domestic life.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Stalin's Problems of Leninism constitutes a codification of this ideological garbage, an official manual of narrow-mindedness, an anthology of enumerated banalities.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The permanent revolution, in the sense which Marx attached to this concept, means a revolution which makes no compromise with any single form of class rule, which does not stop at the democratic stage, which goes over to Socialist measures and to war against reaction from without; that is, a revolution whose every successive stage is rooted in the preceding one and which can end only in the complete liquidation of class society.”

  Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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