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Trotsky Quotes

Browse 37 quotes about Trotsky.

Trotsky Quotes

“[Jürgen Habermas' obituary to friend and philosopher, Richard Rorty] One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”

LoveInspirationalPhilosophyEarthLawDeathHopeJusticeAtheismHolySacredAtheistAutobiographyDescendantsHegelObituaryOrchidsStalinTrotskyJoseph StalinLeon TrotskyIronistRichard RortyGlobal CivilizationRichard Rorty ObituaryStrict Atheist
Author:Jürgen Habermas
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“Lenin had created the conditions for the rise of Stalin, but like Dr Frankenstein the monster outgrew him. He suffered a cerebral haemorrhage on 24 May 1922 and from this time forward his involvement in political affairs was sporadic. Too late he realised, on 25 December 1922, that Stalin represented a real threat to the stability of the Party. He penned a postscript to his famous “Testament”. This called for the removal of Stalin as General Secretary but significantly not from the Politburo. Despite Lenin’s request, the “Testament” was only discussed in the Central Committee, and Stalin’s offer to resign as General Secretary was rejected by Zinoviev and Kamenev. They had now formed a triumvirate with him, and during Lenin’s illness Zinoviev had assumed nominal leadership of the Party. Fearing that any demotion of Stalin would lead to the elevation of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev not only supported him, but hushed up the letters of Lenin.”

SocialismCommunismSoviet RussiaStalinLeninTrotskyLeft CommunismKamenevZinoviev
Book:Russia: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1905-1924. A View from the Communist Left
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“In the center of the movement, as the motor that swings it onto motion, sits the Leader. He is separated from the elite formation by an inner circle of the initiated who spread around him an aura of impenetrable mystery which corresponds to his “intangible preponderance.” His position within this intimate circle depends upon his ability to spin intrigues among its members and upon his skill in constantly changing its personnel. He owes his rise to leadership to an extreme ability to handle inner-party struggles for power rather than to demagogic or bureaucratic-organizational qualities. He is distinguished from earlier types of dictators in that he hardly wins through simple violence. Hitler needed neither the SA nor the SS to secure his position as leader of the Nazi movement; on the contrary, Röhm, the chief of the SA and able to count upon its loyalty to his own person, was one of Hitler’s inner-party enemies. Stalin won against Trotsky, who not only had a far greater mass appeal but, as chief of the Red Army, held in his hands the greatest power potential in Soviet Russia at the time. Not Stalin, but Trotsky, moreover, was the greatest organizational talent, the ablest bureaucrat of the Russian Revolution. On the other hand, both Hitler and Stalin were masters of detail and devoted themselves in the early stages of their careers almost entirely to questions of personnel, so that after a few years hardly any man of importance remained who did not owe his position to them.”

LeaderTotalitarianismHitlerPower StruggleStalinLeadership QualitiesTrotsky1966
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“Trotsky's assault on Kronstadt in March 1921 marked a point of no return. There was no longer even a whiff of pretense that the Communist government had the support of the people over whom it ruled. The Red Terror had been aimed at "class enemies"; the Civil War was a struggle against "imperialists and White Guards." Even the peasant wars had pitted, in theory at least, proletarians against "capitalist farmers." But now the world's first "proletarian" government had begun slaughtering urban proletarians, too. It is no wonder that "Kronstadt" became, in addition to a black mark on Trotsky's record, a byword of Bolshevik betrayal for European socialists who refused to bow to Moscow.”

Russian RevolutionTrotskyKronstadt
Book:The Russian Revolution: A New History
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“Stalinism in turn is not an abstraction of “dictatorship”, but an immense bureaucratic reaction against the proletarian dictatorship in a backward and isolated country. The October Revolution abolished privileges, waged war against social inequality, replaced the bureaucracy with self-government of the toilers, abolished secret diplomacy, strove to render all social relationship completely transparent. Stalinism reestablished the most offensive forms of privileges, imbued inequality with a provocative character, strangled mass self-activity under police absolutism, transformed administration into a monopoly of the Kremlin oligarchy and regenerated the fetishism of power in forms that absolute monarchy dared not dream of.”

HistorySocialismCommunismSoviet UnionUssrStalinTrotsky
Book:The New Course
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“Two weeks later General Kaledin received a deputation from his troops. 'Will you,' the asked, 'promise to divide the estates of the Cossack landlords among the working Cossacks?' 'Only over my dead body,' responded Kaledin. A month later, seeing his army melt away before his eyes, Kaledin blew out his brains. And the Cossack movement was no more...”

RussiaUssrRussian RevolutionLeninTrotskyCossackKaledin
Book:Ten Days That Shook the World
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“Lev Davidovich contemplated the Norwegian landscape and, as he would write shortly afterward, made a silent tally of his exile, to confirm that the losses and frustrations were many more than the doubtful gains. Nine years of marginalization and attacks had managed to turn him into a pariah, a new wandering Jew sentenced to ridicule and the anticipation of a terrible death that would arrive when the humiliation had exhausted its usefulness and quota for sadism. He was leaving Europe, perhaps forever - and with it the corpses of so many comrades and the tombs of his two daughters. With him, he took the faint hope that Liova and Sergei would be able to resist and, at least, escape that whirlwind with their lives intact; they were leaving the illusions, the past, the glory, and the ghosts including those of the revolution for which he had fought for so many years. 'But with me, I am also taking life,' he would write, 'and as beaten down as they think I am, while I still breathe, I have not been defeated.' P. 198”

DefeatResilienceExileTrotskyThe Man Who Loved Dogs
Book:El hombre que amaba a los perros
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“There was more than a little truth in Trotsky's angry accusation of April 1912, after he had suffered the theft of the title of his journal [Pravda], that Lenin nourished himself on discord and chaos. But so did all revolutionary politicians, for revolutionary changes issue from profound crises. The bloody trenches of World War I created an enormous new revolutionary constituency, and only those leaders who knew how to exploit it would be prepared for the struggles that lay ahead.”

LeninTrotsky1990Pravda1912
Book:Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power
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“The state built up by the Bolsheviks reflects not only the thought and will of Bolshevism, but also the cultural level of the country, social composition of the population, the pressure of a barbaric past, and no less barbaric world imperialism. To represent the process of degeneration of the Soviet state as the evolution of pure Bolshevism is to ignore the social reality in the name of only one of its elements, isolated by pure logic. One has only to call this elementary mistake by its real name to do away with every trace of it”

CommunismSoviet UnionMarxismBolshevismTrotsky
Book:Stalinism and Bolshevism: Concerning the Historical and Theoretical Roots of the Fourth International
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“I bet you, if I had met Trotsky, and had had a chat with him, I would have found him a very interesting and human fellow, for I have never yet met a man I didn't like.”

IfsMenHumansAmericaFoundInterestingMetsFellowsVery InterestingTrotsky
Book:Will Rogers' World: America's Foremost Political Humorist Comments on the Twenties and Thirties--and Eighties and Nineties
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“I would trade all the advantages of humanity to be a fly on the wall when Franklin and Jefferson discussed liberty, Lenin and Trotsky revolution, Newton and Halley the shape of the universe, or when Darwin entertained Huxley and Lyell at Down.”

HumanityUniverseLibertyRevolutionWallShapesAdvantageTradeNewtonFranklinHuxleyTrotsky
Book:Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time
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“I was always much impressed, in reading prison memoirs of revolutionists, such as Lenin and Trotsky ... by the amount of reading they did, the languages they studied, the range of their plans for a better social order. (Or rather, for a new social order.) In the Acts of the Apostles there are constant references to the Way and the New Man.”

MenWayOrderReadingLanguageSocialPlansAmountConstantPrisonMemoirRangeImpressedApostlesSocial OrderTrotsky
Author:Dorothy Day
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“There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. Everybody now-a-days is a father, there is father Mussolini and father Hitler and father Roosevelt and father Stalin and father Trotsky and father Blum and father Franco is just commencing now and there are ever so many more ready to be one. Fathers are depressing. England is the only country now that has not got one and so they are more cheerful there than anywhere. It is a long time now that they have not had any fathering and so their cheerfulness is increasing.”

LongCountryFatherDoubtToo MuchReadyLong TimeEnglandNo DoubtDepressingCheerfulCheerfulnessFrancoFatheringTrotsky
Author:Gertrude Stein
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“According to Colonel Ely Garrison, in his autobiography and according to the United States Naval Secret Service Report on Paul Warburg, the Russian Revolution had been financed by the Rothschilds and Warburgs, with a member of the Warburg family carrying the actual funds used by Lenin and Trotsky in Stockholm in 1918.”

StatesUsedUnitedSecretUnited StatesRevolutionMembersReportsFundAutobiographyNavalColonelsSecret ServiceRussian RevolutionStockholmTrotsky
Book:The Study of The Federal Reserve and Its Secrets
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