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

Leon Trotsky Quotes

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

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

— Leon Trotsky

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

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

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

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

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

— Leon Trotsky

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

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

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

— Leon Trotsky

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

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

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

Revolution is impossible until it’s inevitable.

— Leon Trotsky

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

— Leon Trotsky

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

— Leon Trotsky

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

— Leon Trotsky

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

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

— Leon Trotsky

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
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