Quotes About Trotsky

Collectivize one sixth of the earth? How? With what levers? Even the ultraleftist Trotsky, in a speech a few years back, had called a "transition to collective forms" of agriculture a matter of "one or two generations.

It was in such a context that Trotsky scorned "papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life," and Lenin

My favourite author is Leon Trotsky - the political philosophy and the way he writes is beautiful, and really relevant, too.

Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood. We have relied on Trotsky's unrecognizably prejudiced portrait for too long. The truth was different. Trotsky's view tells us more about his own vanity, snobbery and lack of political skills than about the early Stalin.

We must put an end once and for all,' said Trotsky, 'to the Papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.

Stalin impressed Trotsky, whose description reveals why he lost their struggle for power. 'Stalin was very valuable behind the scenes,' he wrote. 'He did have the knack of convincing the average run

If someone from politics got up to give a lecture on New Guinea without having read the literature in the field or been there, the anthropologists would be horrified out of their wits, and properly so. Yet these people get up and lecture on social systems without having read Trotsky or Lenin or Hook. A hell of an attitude for people who make a fetish of scholar!

Trotsky was rushed to a hospital. When the nurses began to undress him, he asked his wife to do it herself. Still conscious, he expressed his love for her, then whispered, "Please say to our friends that I am sure of the victory of the Fourth International. Go forward." Those were his final words. Surgeons struggled for four hours to save him. But the axe had done its job, creating a deep wound in his cranium and brain. He succumbed the next day,

Ma a chi piace la violenza fine a sé stessa? Piaceva a Trotsky, piaceva al Che? Solo i nazisti (che per me costituiscono una specie di categoria mentale al di fuori di ogni periodo storico e di ogni localizzazione nazionale, dagli assiri alle SS) trovano nella violenza una specie di riscatto della debolezza [...].

In 1904, Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-born revolutionary who would not meet Lenin for three more years, condemned his vision of organization as "military ultra-centralism." Trotsky, who sided with Martov, compared Lenin to the Jesuitical Catholic Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes—suspicious toward other people, fanatically attached to the idea, inclined to be dictator while claiming to put down supposedly ubiquitous sedition.

Ungern Sternberg died in September 1921, executed by a Bolshevik firing squad after Trotsky's soldiers captured him. Choudhury taps his folio again, looking severe: He was a very bad man, you know! He had a habit of burning paperwork.

The only way to ensure that Red Army recruits did not desert or run away, Trotsky had concluded, was to mount machine-guns in their rear and shoot any who failed to advance against the enemy. This was the choice he offered: possible death in the front or certain death in the rear. 'We must put an end once and for all', he sneered with a characteristically caustic turn of phrase, 'to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.

Trotsky was so much an intellectual that in the final analysis, Marxism was not quite enough for him.

we should listen to Leon Trotsky. "Revolution is impossible until it is inevitable," he told us.

I think I must be the only British actor who's played both Stalin and Trotsky. I need to play Lenin so I can make it a triptych.

How about this: What's black and white and red all over? I cant begin to think. Trotsky in a tuxedo.

Trotsky once wrote that revolution is the carnival of the masses. When we have that carnival in the West Indies, are people like us here at the university going to join the bacchanal?

[To the Mensheviks:] You are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on—into the dustbin of history!

The vengeance of history is more terrible than the vengeance of the most powerful General Secretary.

With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in "giving a hiding" to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing them to recognize the new order and to submit to it.

The worst crime on the part of the revolutionaries would be to give the smallest concessions to the privileges and prejudices of the whites. Whoever gives his little finger to the devil of chauvinism is lost.

The disagreements between Stalin and Trotsky were real to a certain extent, but they were grossly inflated by the struggle for personal power and never amounted to two independent and coherent theories.

Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and a long line of implementers candidly admitted that force and violence would be necessary. In the close of the Manifesto, Marx said, "The Communists … openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions" (italics added).

Like Rick in Casablanca: "We'll always have Paris." When what we'll always have is, like, Brooklyn and arguments about [Lev] Trotsky.