Leon Trotsky

A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.

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

Thousands and thousands of books are thrown on the market every year
presenting some new variant of the personal romance, some tale of the vacillations
of the melancholic or the career of the ambitious. The heroine of Proust requires
several finely-wrought pages in order to feel that she does not feel anything. It
would seem that one might, at least with equal justice, demand attention to a
series of collective historic dramas which lifted hundreds of millions of human
beings out of nonexistence, transforming the character of nations and intruding
forever into the life of all mankind.

"The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It "knows" who is to get something and who has to wait."

We are concerned here with either real traitors or complete imbeciles. But imbecility, raised to this level, is equal to treason.

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.

Those who lose by a revolution are rarely inclined to call it by its real name. For that name, in spite of the efforts of spiteful reactionaries, is surrounded by the historic memory of mankind with a halo of liberation from all shackles and all prejudices.

City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.

Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics...there lives alongside the 20th century the tenth and thirteenth...What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet, fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of Nazism...

The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only ‘ripened’; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.

إننا نستطيع بالتالي أن نتصفح تاريخ الكومونة كله , صفحة صفحة ، و سوف نجد فيه درس وحيد : قيادة حزبية قوية هي المطلوبة . فأكثر من أي بروليتاريا أخري بذلت الفرنسية تضحيات من أجل الثورة ، و لكن أيضا كانت أكثر من كل الآخرين تعرضت للانخداع . ففي كثير من المرات بهرتها البرجوازية بجميع ألوان الجمهورية ، الراديكالية ، الاشتراكية ، بالرغم من أنها دائما توثق أغلال الرأسمالية عليها .

Against my protests a mausoleum was built on the Red Square, a monument unbecoming and offensive to the revolutionary consciousness.

Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one’s own and that of other people.

"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?"

I was not prepared to play the role of singer in the camp of the warriors