Leon Trotsky Quotes

104 Sourced Quotes

Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.

Leon Trotsky
Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.

Leon Trotsky
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 manoeuvre, a blow with an agreement.

Leon Trotsky
Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies.

Leon Trotsky
The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.

Leon Trotsky
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
Insurrection is an art, and like all arts has its own laws.

Leon Trotsky
If we had had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.

Leon Trotsky
Life is not an easy matter... You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.

Leon Trotsky
There is a limit to the application of democratic methods. You can inquire of all the passengers as to what type of car they like to ride in, but it is impossible to question them as to whether to apply the brakes when the train is at full speed and accident threatens.

Leon Trotsky
Under all conditions, well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points.

Leon Trotsky
Actually, the decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this summary justice showed the world that we would continue to fight mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar's family was needed not only in order to frighten, horrify, and dishearten the enemy but also in order to shake up our own ranks, to show them that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either complete victory or complete ruin.

Leon Trotsky
In 1917 there was not a single Bolshevik who considered possible the realization of a socialist society in a single country, and least of all in Russia.

Leon Trotsky
That the existence of the Soviet Union has an international revolutionary significance is a commonplace equally recognized by friends and foes.

Leon Trotsky
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.

Leon Trotsky
Yet the proletariat has not only a vanguard, but also a rearguard, and besides the proletariat there are the peasantry and the bureaucracy.

Leon Trotsky
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.

Leon Trotsky
The revolution has its own laws: in the period of its culmination it pushes the most highly developed, determined and far-seeing stratum of the revolutionary class to the most advanced positions.

Leon Trotsky
Revolutionary realism tries to draw the maximum advantage from every situation - that is what makes it revolutionary - but at the same time it does not permit us to set ourselves fantastic aims - that is what makes it realistic.

Leon Trotsky
The literary "fellow travelers" of the Revolution.

Leon Trotsky
The bourgeoisie today is a falling class... by its imperialist methods of appropriation [it] is destroying the economic structure of the world and human culture generally. Nevertheless, the historical persistence of the bourgeoisie is colossal. It holds to power, and does not wish to abandon it. Thereby it threatens to drag after it into the abyss the whole of society. We are forced to tear it off, to chop it away. The Red Terror is a weapon utilized against a class, doomed to destruction, which does not wish to perish. If the White Terror can only retard the historical rise of the proletariat, the Red Terror hastens the destruction of the bourgeoisie.

Leon Trotsky
Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes.

Leon Trotsky
The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces — in nature, in society, in man himself.

Leon Trotsky
There is no example in history of a revolutionary movement involving such gigantic masses being so bloodless.

Leon Trotsky
For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.

Leon Trotsky