“The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.”
― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice

“Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.”
― Leon Trotsky

“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, Diary in Exile, 1935

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
― Leon Trotsky

“A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.”
― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice

“Tell me anyway--Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.”
― Leon Trotsky

“In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.”
― Leon Trotsky

“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.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one’s own and that of other people.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies.”
― Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution

“‎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

“The United States is not only the strongest, but also the most terrified country.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.”
― leon trotsky

“...capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling.”
― Leon trotsky

“[Letter to his wife, Natalia Sedova]

In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”
― Leon Trotsky

“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.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.”
― leon trotsky

“You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history!”
― Leon Trotsky

“The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It "knows" who is to get something and who has to wait.”
― Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed

“Fascism is a caricature of Jacobinism.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Workers – men and women – of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory!”
― Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution

“Generally speaking, by the way, that is the moral of the opponents of violence in politics: they renounce violence when it comes to introducing changes in what already exists, but in defense of the existing order they will not stop at the most ruthless acts.”
― Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution

“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

“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

“Let us not forget that revolutions are accomplished through people, although they be nameless. Materialism does not ignore the feeling, thinking, and acting man, but explains him.”
― Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution

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

“Lenin refused to recognise moral norms established by slave-owners for their slaves and never observed by the slave-owners themselves; he called upon the Proletariat to extend the class struggle into the moral sphere too. Who fawns before the precepts established by the enemy will never vanquish that enemy!”
― Leon Trotsky

“Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain - at least in a poor country like Russia - and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect. ”
― Leon Trotsky