Leon Trotsky: Quotes about life

“Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”

Leon Trotsky

Trotsky's Testament (1940)
Context: Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. 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.

Life , Beauty , Evil , Future

“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.”

Leon Trotsky

Trotzky's Diary in Exile — 1935 (1958)

Life , People

“Natasha and I said more than once that one may arrive at such a physical condition that it would be better to cut short one's own life or, more correctly, the too slow process of dying … 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.”

Leon Trotsky

Trotsky's Testament (1940)

Life , Death , Faith , Religion

“Having rationalized his economic system, that is, having saturated it with consciousness and planfulness, man will not leave a trace of the present stagnant and worm-eaten domestic life.”

Leon Trotsky

Literature and Marxism (1924)

Life

“Life in the future will not be monotonous.”

Leon Trotsky

Literature and Marxism(1924)
Context: Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral islands, but will be built consciously, will be tested by thought, will be tested by thought, will be directed and corrected. Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason stagnant. Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build peoples' palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy, and intensity, but also a dynamic quality of the highest degree. The shell of life will hardly have time to form before it will be burst open and again under the pressure of new technical and cultural inventions and achievements. Life in the future will not be monotonous.

Life , Future

“If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the "mirror" of literature? Of course no one speaks about an exact mirror. No one even thinks of asking the new literature to have mirror-like impassivity. The deeper literature is, and the more it is imbued with the desire to shape life, the more significantly and dynamically it will be able to "picture" life.”

Leon Trotsky book Literature and Revolution

Literature and Revolution (1924), edited by William Keach (2005), Ch. 4 : Futurism, p. 120
Variants:
Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.
Remarks apparently derived from Trotsky's observations, or those he implies preceded his own, this is attributed to Bertolt Brecht in Paulo Freire : A Critical Encounter (1993) by Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard, p. 80, and to Vladimir Mayakovsky in The Political Psyche (1993) by Andrew Samuels, p. 9
Art is not a mirror held up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.
Context: Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes. But at present even the handling of a hammer is taught with the help of a mirror, a sensitive film that records all the movements. Photography and motion-picture photography, owing to their passive accuracy of depiction, are becoming important educational instruments in the field of labor. If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the "mirror" of literature? Of course no one speaks about an exact mirror. No one even thinks of asking the new literature to have mirror-like impassivity. The deeper literature is, and the more it is imbued with the desire to shape life, the more significantly and dynamically it will be able to "picture" life.

Life , Literature , Thinking

“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

Trotzky's Diary in Exile — 1935 (1958)
Source: Diary in Exile, 1935

Life , Idea , Personality

“We are fighting. We are fighting a life-and-death struggle. The Press is a weapon not of an abstract society, but of two irreconcilable, armed and contending sides. We are destroying the Press of the counter-revolution, just as we destroyed its fortified positions, its stores, its communications and its intelligence system.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

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

Life , Death , Intelligence , Communication

“If it is a question of seeking formal contradictions, then obviously we must do so on the side of the White Terror, which is the weapon of classes which consider themselves “Christian,” patronize idealist philosophy, and are firmly convinced that the individuality (their own) is an end-in-itself. As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the “sacredness of human life.” We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 4