Top 90 Leon Trotsky Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the sacredness of human life.”

— Leon Trotsky

52. “Our party’s most outstanding mediocrity.”

— Leon Trotsky

53. “Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.”

— Leon Trotsky

54. “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.”

— Leon Trotsky

55. “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.”

— Leon Trotsky

56. “Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.”

— Leon Trotsky

57. “Where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation.”

— Leon Trotsky

58. “City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.”

— Leon Trotsky

59. “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.”

— Leon Trotsky

60. “The usages and methods of warfare are thus determined by changing circumstances and, therefore, they themselves can in nowise be eternal.”

— Leon Trotsky

61. “From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.”

— Leon Trotsky

62. “One of the most surprising things in life is the sudden realization that one has become old.”

— Leon Trotsky

63. “Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”

— Leon Trotsky

64. “If we had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.”

— Leon Trotsky

65. “A revolution is always distinguished by impoliteness, probably because the ruling classes did not take the trouble in good season to teach the people fine manners.”

— Leon Trotsky

66. “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.”

— Leon Trotsky

67. “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.”

— Leon Trotsky

68. “Under all conditions, well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points.”

— Leon Trotsky

69. “Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain – at least in a poor country like Russia – and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.”

— Leon Trotsky

70. “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”

— Leon Trotsky

71. “Slavophilism, the messianism of backwardness, has based its philosophy upon the assumption that the Russian people and their church are democratic through and through, whereas official Russia is a German bureaucracy imposed upon them by Peter the Great.”

— Leon Trotsky

72. “Without a guiding organization, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam.”

— Leon Trotsky

73. “Revolution is impossible until it’s inevitable.”

— Leon Trotsky

74. “The so-called “breeding” of the tsar, his ability to control himself in the most extraordinary circumstances, cannot be explained by a mere external training; its essence was an inner indifference, a poverty of spiritual forces, a weakness of the impulses of the will. That mask of indifference which was called breeding in certain circles, was a natural part of Nicholas at birth. The.”

— Leon Trotsky

75. “The worst crime on the part of the revolutionaries would be to give the smallest concessions to the privileges and prejudices of the whites. Whoever gives his little finger to the devil of chauvinism is lost.”

— Leon Trotsky

76. “Terror is a powerful means of policy and one would have to be a hypocrite not to understand this.”

— Leon Trotsky

77. “The serious and critical reader will not want a treacherous impartiality, which offers him a cup of conciliation with a well-settled poison of reactionary hate at the bottom, but a scientific conscientiousness, which for its sympathies and antipathies – open and undisguised – seeks support in an honest study of the facts, a determination of their real connections, an exposure of the causal laws of their movement.”

— Leon Trotsky

78. “A necessity has two ends: the reactionary and the progressive. History teaches that persons and parties which drag at the opposite ends of a necessity turn out in the long run on opposite sides of the barricade.”

— Leon Trotsky

79. “It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics.”

— Leon Trotsky

80. “Culture feeds on the sap of economics, and a material surplus is necessary, so that culture may grow, develop and become subtle.”

— Leon Trotsky

81. “The war produced a dreadful desolation in the underground movement. After the arrest of the Duma faction, the Bolsheviks had no centralized party organization at all. The local committees had an episodic existence, and often had no connections with the workers’ districts.”

— Leon Trotsky

82. “The Russian proletariat found its revolutionary audacity not only in itself. Its very position as minority of the nation suggests that it could not have given its struggle a sufficient scope – certainly not enough to take its place at the head of the state – if it had not found a mighty support in the thick of the people. Such a support was guaranteed to it by the agrarian problem.”

— Leon Trotsky

83. “Lincoln’s significance lies in his not hesitating before the most severe means, once they were found to be necessary, in achieving a great historic aim posed by the development of a young nation.”

— Leon Trotsky

84. “He who thinks of renouncing “physical” struggle must renounce all struggle, for the spirit does not live without the flesh.”

— Leon Trotsky

85. “The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only ‘ripened’; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.”

— Leon Trotsky

86. “Literature without the power of great synthesis is the symptom of social weariness and is characteristic of sharply transitional epochs.”

— Leon Trotsky

87. “In the meantime, the first characteristic of a really revolutionary party is – to be able to look reality in the face.”

— Leon Trotsky

88. “The fundamental evil of the capitalist system is not the extravagance of the possessing classes, however disgusting that may be in itself, but the fact that in order to guarantee its right to extravagance the bourgeoisie maintains its private ownership of the means of production, thus condemning the economic system to anarchy and decay.”

— Leon Trotsky

89. “The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state is a bourgeois cop, not a worker.”

— Leon Trotsky

90. “The artist can not serve his struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates the social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.”

— Leon Trotsky

91. “We are concerned here with either real traitors or complete imbeciles. But imbecility, raised to this level, is equal to treason.”

— Leon Trotsky

92. “Those who lose by a revolution are rarely inclined to call it by its real name. For that name, in spite of the efforts of spiteful reactionaries, is surrounded by the historic memory of mankind with a halo of liberation from all shackles and all prejudices.”

— Leon Trotsky

93. “We may set it down as a historical law: fascism was able to conquer only in those countries where the conservative labor parties prevented the proletariat from utilizing the revolutionary situation and seizing power.”

— Leon Trotsky