Leon Trotsky Quotes

Lenin was a Russian bourgeois who cursed the weakness and ineptitude of the Russian bourgeoisie

Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.

The collapse of Russia was the second great event of 1917.

Lenin, the greatest theorist of them all, did not know what he was going to do after he had got the power.

It can't work—for Lenin and Trotsky are both extremely unpopular.... Lenin ... will never be able to dominate the Russian people.

Yesterday Kerensky; today Lenin and Trotsky; another tomorrow.

Now that the great revolution has come one feels that however intelligent Lenin may be he begins to fade beside the genius of Trotsky

… the great mischief-maker Lenin

In the appendix to my History of the Russian Revolution I give a detailed and documented study of the ideas of the Bolshevik party on the October revolution. This study, I hope, will make it impossible in the future to ascribe to [Vladimir] Lenin the theory of Socialism in a single country.

In the early days of the Russian Revolution in 1917, I was completely in sympathy with it. I felt that it established a new era in the history of the modern world. I was so overwhelmed by it that, if people made any unfriendly comment, I would vigorously defend it. If people condemned the Communist party, I would speak in its defense.

My father was convinced, I think rightly, that if he stayed in Russia, he would have trouble with Lenin.

Ten days that shook the world.

Lenin strove constantly to get the people to understand that the leaders could not do everything for them, that they them-selves, with their own hands, would have to build a new life and defend their own state; in this he proved himself to be a real people's leader, able to show the people the way forward and induce them to take the first step forward fully conscious of their aim, instead of following blindly behind the leaders.

We only need one, in the same way that Lenin only needed one.

Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service.

For about 20 years we have had practically no collective leadership; there flourished the cult of the individual which was [earlier] condemned first by Marx and then by Lenin

Lenin had just reflected that the revolution would never happen in his lifetime when in February 1917, hungry crowds in Petrograd overthrew Nicholas II while the revolutionaries were abroad, exiled, or infiltrated by the secret police.

While signing 'Sakhavu,' I wasn't aware of the depth of communism in Kerala. I was born and brought up in Chennai, and our political ideologies are very different.

Leninism is Marxism of the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution.

Trotsky found out about him - Leon Trotsky - because A.J.[Muste] worked. He was an activist. And he organized the first sit-in strike in Toledo in a factory. And Trotsky was very impressed with that.

[Khrushchev] should get a one-ton medal.

It is a matter of record that in the German Election of 1933, the Communist Party was ordered by its leaders to vote for the Nazis - with the explanation that they could later fight the Nazis for power, but first they had to help destroy their common enemy : capitalism and its parliamentary form of government.

In Russia itself the proletariat conquered in spite of the fact that there was no Soviet State in existence at the time elsewhere. For the victory are necessary, not only certain objective conditions, internal as well as external, but also certain subjective factors - the Party, the leadership, the strategy.

Bukharin's a swine and surely worse than a swine because he thinks it below his dignity to write a couple of lines.