Read how to open files in File Open Database.

leon trotsky Quotes

Leon Trotsky Quotes

Birth Date: 1914-02-07 (Saturday, February 7th, 1914)
Date of Death: 1940-08-21 (Wednesday, August 21st, 1940)

 

leon trotsky life timeline

The Pravda newspaper founded by Leon Trotsky, Adolph Joffe, Matvey Skobelev and other Russian exiles in Vienna.Saturday, October 3rd, 1908
Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, leaving Joseph Stalin in undisputed control of the Soviet Union.Saturday, November 12th, 1927
The Soviet Union exiles Leon Trotsky.Thursday, January 31st, 1929
In Moscow, 17 leading Communists go on trial accused of participating in a plot led by Leon Trotsky to overthrow Joseph Stalin s regime and assassinate its leaders.Saturday, January 23rd, 1937
Exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky is fatally wounded in Mexico City by an assassin s ice axe. He dies the next day.Tuesday, August 20th, 1940

Quotes

    • As long as I breathe I hope. As long as I breathe I shall fight for the future, that radiant future, in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and happiness!
    • In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their own powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who someday will come and accomplish his mission.
    • The struggle against war, properly understood and executed, presupposes the uncompromising hostility of the proletariat and its organizations, always and everywhere, toward its own and every other imperialist bourgeoisie...
    • The struggle against war and its social source, capitalism, presupposes direct, active, unequivocal support to the oppressed colonial peoples in their struggles and wars against imperialism. A 'neutral' position is tantamount to support of imperialism.
    • Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.
    • A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified. (Also quoted as 'The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.')
    • But whatever may be the circumstances of my death, I shall die with unshaken faith in the Communist future. This faith in man and in his future gives me even now such power of resistance as cannot be given by any religion . . . 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.
    • Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man.
    • As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the 'sacredness of human life.'
    • 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...
    • We have to run a hot iron down the spine of the Ukrainian kulaks - that will create a good working environment.
    • Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service...
    • The life of a revolutionary would be quite impossible without a certain amount of 'fatalism.'
    • In these pages, I continue the struggle to which my whole life is devoted. Describing, I also characterize and evaluate; narrating, I also defend myself, and more often attack. It seems to me that this is the only method of making an autobiography objective in a higher sense, that is, of making it the most adequate expression of personality, conditions, and epoch. Objectivity is not the pretended indifference with which confirmed hypocrisy, in speaking of friends and enemies, suggests indirectly to the reader what it finds inconvenient to state directly. Objectivity of this sort is nothing but a conventional trick. I do not need it. Since I have submitted to the necessity of writing about myself - nobody has as yet succeeded in writing an autobiography without writing about himself - I can have no reason to hide my sympathies or antipathies, my loves or my hates.
    • I know well enough, from my own experience, the historical ebb and flow. They are governed by their own laws. Mere impatience will not expedite their change. I have grown accustomed to viewing the historical perspective not from the stand point of my personal fate. To understand the causal sequence of events and to find somewhere in the sequence one's own place - that is the first duty of a revolutionary. And at the same time, it is the greatest personal satisfaction possible for a man who does not limit his tasks to the present day.
    • I do not measure the historical process by the yardstick of one's personal fate. On the contrary, I appraise my fate objectively and live it subjectively, only as it is inextricably bound up with the course of social development. Since my exile, I have more than once read musings in the newspapers on the subject of the 'tragedy' that has befallen me. I know no personal tragedy. I know the change of two chapters of the revolution. One American paper which published an article of mine accompanied it with a profound note to the effect that in spite of the blows the author had suffered, he had, as evidenced by his article, preserved his clarity of reason. I can only express my astonishment at the philistine attempt to establish a connection between the power of reasoning and a government post, between mental balance and the present situation. I do not know, and I never have, of any such connection. In prison, with a book or a pen in my hand, I experienced the same sense of deep satisfaction that I did at the mass-meetings of the revolution. I felt the mechanics of power as an inescapable burden, rather than as a spiritual satisfaction
    • 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.
    • Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not deny the syllogism, but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality.
    • The concrete is a combination of abstractions - not an arbitrary or subjective combination but one that corresponds to the laws of the movement of a given phenomenon.
    • Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction.
    • 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.
    • It was the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himself rose to his position.
    • Insurrection is an art, and like all arts has its own laws.
    • 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.
    • Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • Socialism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen.
    • The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • The German soldiers, that is, the workers and peasants, will in the majority of cases have far more sympathy for the vanquished peoples than for their own ruling caste. The necessity to act at every step in the capacity of 'pacifiers' and oppressors will swiftly disintegrate the armies of occupation, infecting them with a revolutionary spirit.
    • You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.
    • We must accept decisively and without any reservation the complete and unconditional right of the blacks to independence . . . The proletarian revolutionaries must never forget the right of the oppressed nationalities to self-determination, including full separation, and the duty of the proletariat of the oppressing nation to defend this right with arms if necessary. . .
    • In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.
    • When Victor Adler objected to Berchtold, foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, that war would provoke revolution in Russia, even if not in the Habsburg monarchy, he replied: 'And who will lead this revolution? Perhaps Mr. Bronstein sitting over there at the Cafe Central?'
    • Proof of Trotsky's farsightedness is that none of his predictions has yet come true.
    • You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
    • leon trotsky

Quotes by Famous People

Who Were Also Born On February 7thWho Also Died On August 21st
Eddie Izzard
Emo Philips
Dan Quisenberry
Leon Trotsky
Sinclair Lewis
Alfred Adler
Charles Dickens
Constant Lambert
Leon Trotsky
John Hart
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Elizabeth Bath
Bernard of Clairvaux

Copyright © www.quotesby.net