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Where the sole employer is the state, [opposition] means death by slow starvation.

Leon Trotsky

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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
Slow
State
Means
Death
Employer
States
Starvation
Mean
Employers
Sole
Opposition

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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.
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The slanders poured down like Niagara. If you take into consideration the setting - the war and the revolution - and the character of the accused - revolutionary leaders of millions who were conducting their party to the sovereign power - you can say without exaggeration that July 1917 was the month of the most gigantic slander in world history.
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Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service.
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Dialectical thought 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.
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Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies.
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Simultaneously the Left Opposition in the course of several years carried on a struggle against the Stalinists in favor of collectivization.
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Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.
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I wrote a study about this question, The Lessons of October, which served as a pretext for my elimination from the government.
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A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.
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In spite of the existence of the Soviet Union, however, the proletarian revolution during the past years has not recorded a victory in any other country.
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In Russia itself the proletariat conquered in spite of the fact that there was no Soviet State in existence at the time elsewhere. For the victory are necessary, not only certain objective conditions, internal as well as external, but also certain subjective factors - the Party, the leadership, the strategy.
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Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler his body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above these heights, new peaks will rise.
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As long as human labor power, and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the “sacredness of human life” remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains.
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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.
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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.
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Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one’s own and that of other people.
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There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.
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The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.
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[Vladimir] Lenin died in January, 1924 three months later [Joseph] Stalin expounded in writing Lenin's conception of the proletarian revolution.
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The struggle against war and its social source, capitalism, presupposes direct, active, unequivocal support to the oppressed colonial peoples in their struggles and wars against imperialism. A 'neutral' position is tantamount to support of imperialism.
Leon Trotsky