Leon Trotsky

Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction.

Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one’s enemies.

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 The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.

Between his consciousness and events stood always that impenetrable medium – indifference.

?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.

Workers – men and women – of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory!

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities – a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces –a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.

We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.

The one who cannot restrain their anger will wish undone, what their temper and irritation prompted them to do.

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

The jealous are troublesome to others, but a torment to themselves.

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life;

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books nobody reads.

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

Watch what you say, and whatever you say, practice it.

To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else – these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.