Leon Trotsky Quotes

104 Sourced Quotes

Against my protests a mausoleum was built on the Red Square, a monument unbecoming and offensive to the revolutionary consciousness.

Leon Trotsky
I thank warmly the friends who remained loyal to me through the most difficult hours of my life. I do not name anyone in particular because I cannot name them all.
However, I consider myself justified in making an exception in the case of my companion, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova. In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.

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

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

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

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
Not believing in force is the same thing as not believing in gravitation.

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
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
The dictatorship of the Communist Party is maintained by recourse to every form of violence.

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

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 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
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
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
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
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
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 1925 - 27 the revolution in China was destroyed by the false revolutionary strategy of the Stalinist faction. To this last question I consecrate my book, Problems of the Chinese Revolution (issued by the Pioneer Publishers, New York 1932).

Leon Trotsky
Once again, he who ignores the problems of revolutionary strategy would do better not to talk about revolutions at all.

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

Leon Trotsky
The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.

Leon Trotsky
Is it possible to fulfill this task, is it possible to achieve the definite victory of Socialism in one country without the combined efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries? No, it is impossible.

Leon Trotsky
In spite of the existence of the Soviet Union, however, the proletarian revolution during the past years has not recorded a victory in any other country.

Leon Trotsky
The main task of Socialism - the organization of Socialist production - remains still in the future.

Leon Trotsky
The boycott of parliamentary institutions on the part of anarchists and semianarchists is dictated by a desire not to submit their weakness to a test on the part of the masses, thus preserving their right to an inactive hauteur which makes no difference to anybody. A revolutionary party can turn its back to a parliament only if it has set itself the immediate task of overthrowing the existing regime.

Leon Trotsky
What shall we call an "immediate possibility"? In 1923 the situation in Germany was profoundly revolutionary, but what was lacking for a victorious revolution was a correct strategy.

Leon Trotsky
In France, the leader of Jacobinism perished on the guillotine; with us, the change of leadership was achieved by means of arrest and banishment. The technique of the process is gentler, but its essence is the same.

Leon Trotsky
If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the "mirror" of literature?

Leon Trotsky