Leon Trotsky

Everyone has a right to be stupid, but Comrade MacDonald abuses the privilege.

If you cannot convince a Fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement.

Against my protests a mausoleum was built on the Red Square, a monument unbecoming and offensive to the revolutionary consciousness.

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

In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a dictator substitutes himself for the central committee.

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

Under all conditions, well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points.

The United States is not only the strongest, but also the most terrified country.

The bourgeoisie, which far surpasses the proletariat in the completeness and irreconcilibility of its class consciousness, is vitally interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited masses. It is exactly for this purpose that the concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions...The appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophic mistake but a necessary element in the mechanics of class deception.

Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.