Leon Trotsky

It was as the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himself rose to his position.

I felt the mechanics of power as an inescapable burden, rather than as a spiritual satisfaction.

I do not measure the historical process by the yardstick of one's personal fate.

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.

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

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.

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 …

In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.

The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable.

The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and, very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfillment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of …

Stalin's Problems of Leninism constitutes a codification of this ideological garbage, an official manual of narrow-mindedness, an anthology of enumerated banalities.

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, …

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.

I will say in a few words why the anarchist doctrine is wrong. The anarchists say that the working class does not need a government: what is needs is to organize production. Government, they say, is a bourgeois invention, a bourgeois …

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

We communists know only one possession that is sacred — the life of the working man, the life of the worker, his wife and his children. That is the only possession which is sacred so far as we are concerned, and it gives us the right to do …

Terror can be very efficient against a reactionary class which does not want to leave the scene of operations. Intimidation is a powerful weapon of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon …

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 …

Repression for the attainment of economic ends is a necessary weapon of the socialist dictatorship.

No one yet has learned to drive a locomotive sitting in his study.

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.

In times of peace, the capitalists used to guarantee their interests by means of the "peaceful" robbery of hired labor. During the war they served those same interests by means of the destruction of countless human lives.

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 …