All essential items in Trotskys programme were in perfect agreement wi — Leon Trotsky

"Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man."

"Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other."

"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."

"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

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

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

"Have you not heard When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo, His best friends hear no more of him?"

"A good-natured woman...which is as much as you can expect from a friends wife, whom you got acquainted with a bachelor."

"Every friend says, “I am your friend, too,” but some friends are only friends in name. Is it not a deadly grief when a companion or friend turns into an enemy? O evil intention! From where have you sprung, to cover the earth with deceit? One kind of comrade takes advantage of his friend’s good fortune; in time of trouble he turns against him. Another kind shares his friend’s suffering, for the sake of a meal; when it comes to a fight, he thinks only of saving himself. Do not neglect a friend or forget him once you are wealthy."

"If you want to make peace, you dont talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies."

"He had had many conversations during his long life. Some were fascinating and stayed with him more than a century later. Others were less so. As a younger man he had tolerated those as part of the cost of doing business—a sort of tax that all people must pay in order to take part in civilized society. When he had turned one hundred, he had decided to stop paying that tax. Henceforth he would engage only in conversations that really interested him—which, with a few exceptions for close friends and family members, meant conversations with a purpose."

"...the incompetence of intelligence agencies is legendary.... Just take Vietnam.... In the late 1940s, the United States was kind of unclear about which side to support.... In the case of Indochina, for whatever reason, they decided at one point to support France in its reconquest of Indochina. Well, at that point, essentially orders went to the U.S. intelligence communities, CIA and others, to demonstrate ... that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were agents of either the Russians or the Chinese.... They couldnt do it. They couldnt find anything.... The conclusion in the State Department was, "OK, this proves that theyre agents of the international communist conspiracy. Ho Chi Minh is such a loyal slave of"—pick it, Mao or Stalin—"that he doesnt even need orders."."