Leon Trotsky Quotes

Best Quotes by Leon Trotsky (Top 10)

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.
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
Tell me anyway—Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.
Leon Trotsky
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
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 The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.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
Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.
Leon Trotsky
The bourgeoisie, which far surpasses the proletariat in the completeness and irreconcilibility of its class consciousness, is vitally interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited masses. It is exactly for this purpose that the concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions...The appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophic mistake but a necessary element in the mechanics of class deception.
Leon Trotsky
There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.
Leon Trotsky
Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies.
Leon Trotsky
As a general rule, man strives to avoid labor. Love for work is not at all an inborn characteristic: it is created by economic pressure and social education. One may even say that man is a fairly lazy animal. It is on this quality, in reality, that is founded to a considerable extent all human progress; because if man did not strive to expend his energy economically, did not seek to receive the largest possible quantity of products in return for a small quantity of energy, there would have been no technical development or social culture.
Leon Trotsky

More Leon Trotsky Quotes

âThe 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
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
Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.
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
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.
Leon Trotsky
Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction.
Leon Trotsky
Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravity.
Leon Trotsky
In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.
Leon Trotsky
If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.
Leon Trotsky