Leon Trotsky

The struggle for socialism is a struggle for human liberation.

The working class is the only truly international class.

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and forever.

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.

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.

The revolution is merciless, not only toward those who lag behind, but toward those who run ahead.

Fascism is not merely a system of reprisals, of brutal force, and of police terror. Fascism is a particular governmental system based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society.

The end result of the revolution can only be the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Where there is no revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.

Socialism needs democracy like the human body needs a nervous system.

The Old Man (Lenin) made mistakes, but he was always honest.

The national program of socialism is only a bridge to the international program.

The greatest crime of Stalinism is that it killed the revolution.

The struggle for power is a struggle for the minds of men.

The bureaucracy, having expropriated the proletariat politically, now seeks to expropriate it economically.

War is the locomotive of history, but the revolution is its engineer.

The party is not a talking shop, but a fighting organisation.

The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.

The more conscious the working class, the more revolutionary it is.