Leon Trotsky

Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely. But one must know the limitations of force; one must know when to blend force with a maneuver, a blow with an agreement.

Revolutions are always verbose.

Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.

It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics.

I was not prepared to play the role of singer in the camp of the warriors

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.

This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There’s only change, and resistance to it and then more change.

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder – in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

Anger makes dull men witty – but it keeps them poor.

Knowledge does not come to us in details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

If you would have me weep, you must first of all feel grief yourself.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

Intellectual work is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.

For character too is a process and an unfolding… among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?

It’s much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.

Patience and diligence, like faith, remove mountains.