Quote

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

Leon Trotsky

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Leon Trotsky
Age: 60 †
Born: 1879
Born: January 1
Died: 1940
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Diplomat
Historian
Journalist
Military Personnel
Philosopher
Politician
Revolutionary
Writer
N. Trotsky
Lev Bronstein
Lev Davidovich Bronshtein
Lev Davidovich Bronstein
Leon Trotski
Magnanimous
Cruelty
Worse
Serious
Struggle
Time
Inopportune

More quotes by Leon Trotsky

Image
From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.
Leon Trotsky
Image
In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.
Leon Trotsky
Image
National self-sufficiency or autarchy is the ideal of [Adolf] Hitler, not of [Karl] Marx and [Vladimir] Lenin.
Leon Trotsky
Image
[Joseph] Stalin closes the exposition of these [Leon Trotsky] ideas with the words, Such are in general the characteristic features of [Vladimir] Lenin's conception of the proletarian revolution.
Leon Trotsky
Image
You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.
Leon Trotsky
Image
Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies.
Leon Trotsky
Image
The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls 'inspiration.'
Leon Trotsky
Image
What shall we call an immediate possibility? In 1923 the situation in Germany was profoundly revolutionary, but what was lacking for a victorious revolution was a correct strategy.
Leon Trotsky
Image
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
Image
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.
Leon Trotsky
Image
The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.
Leon Trotsky
Image
Nowhere else did repressions, purges, suppressions, and all other kinds of bureaucratic hooliganism in general acquire such horrifying scope as in Ukraine, in the struggle against powerful forces concealed in the Ukrainian masses that desired more freedom and independence.
Leon Trotsky
Image
Terror, as the demonstration of the will and strength of the working class, is historically justified, precisely because the proletariat was able thereby to break the political will of the intelligentsia, pacify the professional man of various categories and work, and gradually subordinate them to its own aims within the field of their specialties.
Leon Trotsky
Image
Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full.
Leon Trotsky
Image
Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever.
Leon Trotsky
Image
The Soviet State does not need either illusions or camouflage. It can claim only that world authority which is confirmed by the facts.
Leon Trotsky
Image
The theory of the permanent revolution, in contradiction to the theory of socialism in one country, was recognized by the entire Bolshevik party during the period from 1917 to 1923.
Leon Trotsky
Image
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
Image
In France, the leader of Jacobinism perished on the guillotine with us, the change of leadership was achieved by means of arrest and banishment. The technique of the process is gentler, but its essence is the same.
Leon Trotsky
Image
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?
Leon Trotsky