Leon Trotsky Quotes

104 Sourced Quotes

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

Leon Trotsky
The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.

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
Workers – men and women – of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory!

Leon Trotsky
Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above these heights, new peaks will rise.

Leon Trotsky
It was as the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himself rose to his position.

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

Leon Trotsky
If we close our eyes to the dark sides of the workers' State which we have helped to create, we shall never reach socialism.

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

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

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
Capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling.

Leon Trotsky
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
The theory of the permanent revolution, in contradiction to the theory of socialism in one country, was recognized by the entire Bolshevik party during the period from 1917 to 1923.

Leon Trotsky
There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.

Leon Trotsky
You [the Mensheviks] are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on—into the dustbin of history!

Leon Trotsky
In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.

Leon Trotsky
It is also false that the revolution ripens and comes to development only in the national soil.

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

Leon Trotsky
In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.

Leon Trotsky