Leon Trotsky: Trending quotes (page 3)

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“In not more than a month's time terror will assume very violent forms, after the example of the great French Revolution; the guillotine… will be ready for our enemies… that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which makes man shorter by a head.”

Leon Trotsky

As quoted in The Cheka : Lenin's Political Police (1981) by George Leggett, p. 54

Time

“War is most often a form of tyranny. It is best described by paraphrasing Trotsky's aphorism about the dialectic: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."”

Leon Trotsky

Misattributed
Context: : In a later work, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (2000) by Michael Walzer, the author states: War is most often a form of tyranny. It is best described by paraphrasing Trotsky's aphorism about the dialectic: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." This statement on dialectic itself seems to be a paraphrase, with the original in In Defense of Marxism Part VII : "Petty-Bourgeois Moralists and the Proletarian Party" (1942) https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/idom/dm/32-goldman2.htm — where Trotsky publishes a letter to Albert Goldman (5 June 1940) has been translated as "Burnham doesn't recognize dialectics but dialectics does not permit him to escape from its net." More discussion on the origins of this quotation can be found at The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist Brad DeLong: Fair and Balanced Almost Every Day http://econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/2003_archives/002422.html.

War

“We Marxist communists are profoundly opposed to the anarchist doctrine. This doctrine is erroneous”

Leon Trotsky

Order by the commissar for military affairs - on the murder of count Mirbach
How the Revolution Armed (1923)

“The [Soviet Union] bureaucracy not only has not disappeared, yielding its place to the masses, but has turned into an uncontrolled force dominating the masses.”

Leon Trotsky book The Revolution Betrayed

Source: The Revolution Betrayed (1936), p. 40 in Doubleday, Doran & Company edition (1937)

“The life of a revolutionary would be quite impossible without a certain amount of "fatalism."”

Leon Trotsky book My Life

Foreword (1929) http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/foreword.htm
My Life (1930)

Life

“The dialectics of history have already hooked him and will raise him up. He is needed by all of them; by the tired radicals, by the bureaucrats, by the Nepmen, the upstarts, by all the worms that are crawling out of the upturned soil of the manured revolution. He knows how to meet them on their own ground, he speaks their language and he knows how to lead them. He has the deserved reputation of an old revolutionist, which makes him invaluable to them as a blinder on the eyes of the country. He has will and daring. He will not hesitate to utilize them and to move them against the Party. Right now he is organising himself around the sneaks of the party, the artful dodgers.”

Leon Trotsky

Statement of 1924 on Joseph Stalin's growing powerbase, in Stalin, An Appraisal Of The Man And His Influence (1966); also in Stalin's Russia 1924-53 by Michael Lynch, p. 18

Art , History , Country

“Stalinism and fascism, in spite of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of their features they show a deadly similarity.”

Leon Trotsky book The Revolution Betrayed

Source: The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Ch. 11

“The Soviet bureaucracy is like all ruling classes in that it is ready to shut its eyes to the crudest mistakes of its leaders in the sphere of general politics, provided in return they show an unconditional fidelity in the defense of its privileges.”

Leon Trotsky book The Revolution Betrayed

The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

“What, however, is our relation to revolution? Civil war is the most severe of all forms of war. It is unthinkable not only without violence against tertiary figures but, under contemporary technique, without murdering old men, old women and children… There is no impervious demarcation between ‘peaceful’ class struggle and revolution. Every strike embodies in an unexpanded form all the elements of civil war.”

Leon Trotsky

Their Morals and Ours (1938)

Women , Men , War , Children

“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!”

Leon Trotsky

"On Optimism and Pessimism, on the Twentieth Century, and on Many Other Things" (1901), as quoted in The Prophet Armed : Trotsky, 1879-1921 (2003) by Isaac Deutscher , p. 45

Beauty , Hope , History , Strong

“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 book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), p. 83

World , Tear

“This book was written in 1920 in the car of a military train and amid the flames of the civil war. The circumstance the reader must keep before his eyes if he wishes rightly to understand not only the basic material of the book, but also its harsh allusion, and particularly the tone in which it is written.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Introduction to the Second English Edition
Terrorism and Communism (1920)

War , Books , Cars , Understanding

“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.”

Leon Trotsky

Why Marxists oppose Individual Terrorism http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1911/11/tia09.htm, article published in the Austrian Social Democratic paper Der Kampf (1909)

Hope

“We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right… And if the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I shall support the consequences of the decision to the end.”

Leon Trotsky

Speech at the XIIIth Party Congress (May 1924)

Way , History , Support , Thinking

“In case of actual danger, the social democracy banks not on the "Iron Front" but on the Prussian police. It is reckoning without its host! The fact that the police was originally recruited in large numbers from among social-democratic workers is absolutely meaningless. Consciousness is determined by environment even in this instance. The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker. Of late years, these policemen have had to do much more fighting with revolutionary workers than with Nazi students. Such training does not fail to leave its effects. And above all: every policeman knows that though governments may change, the police remains.”

Leon Trotsky

Source: Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (1944), Ch. 4

Democracy , Change , Fight , Training

“In war, where both success and failure are repaid by death, hostile agents who penetrate into the rear are subject to execution. This is inhuman, but no one ever considered war a school of humanity.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 3

Death , Hostility , War , School

“Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction; from the point of view of the proletariat the difference between the types of reaction is meaningless.”

Leon Trotsky

What Next? (1932)

“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

Trotsky's Testament (1940)

Love , Life , Fate , Suffering

“The permanent revolution, in the sense which Marx attached to this concept, means a revolution which makes no compromise with any single form of class rule, which does not stop at the democratic stage, which goes over to Socialist measures and to war against reaction from without; that is, a revolution whose every successive stage is rooted in the preceding one and which can end only in the complete liquidation of class society.”

Leon Trotsky book The Permanent Revolution

The Permanent Revolution (1929)

War , Sense , Success

“Can we, however, expect that the Soviet Union will come out of the coming great war without defeat? To this frankly posed question, we will answer as frankly: If the war should remain only a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union would be inevitable. In a technical, economic, and military sense, imperialism in incomparably more strong. If it is not paralyzed by revolution in the West, imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October revolution.”

Leon Trotsky book The Revolution Betrayed

Source: The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Ch. 8

War , Question , Sense , Strong