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 … - Leon Trotsky

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Engraved portrait of Leon Trotsky, facing right

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.

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About Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky (Лев Давидович Троцкий; born Lev Davidovich Bronstein; Лев Давидович Бронштейн]; 7 November (O.S. 26 October) 1879 – 21 August 1940) was a Russian Marxist, intellectual, and revolutionary. In the early Soviet Union, he founded the Politburo, served as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and created and led the Red Army. After Lenin's death, Trotsky was exiled for his opposition to Joseph Stalin's policies. His 1940 assassination (with an ice axe) in Mexico was carried out by a Soviet agent (Ramón Mercader) at Stalin's behest.

Biography information from Wikiquote · Portrait adapted from Wikimedia Commons (Public domain / CC0)

Also Known As

Pen Names: Троцкий Перо Антид Ото Л. Седов Старик
Native Name: Лейба Давидович Бронштейн Лев Давидович Троцкий
Alternative Names: Lev Bronstein Lev Davidovich Bronshtein Lev Davidovich Bronstein Leon Trotski Trotsky Lev Davidovich Bronshteyn Lev Bronshteyn Lev Trotsky Trotskiy Lev Trotskiy Lev Davidovich Trotsky Lev Davidovich Trotskiy

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Additional quotes by 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.

Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics...there lives alongside the 20th century the tenth and thirteenth...What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet, fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of Nazism...

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Natasha and I said more than once that one may arrive at such a physical condition that it would be better to cut short one's own life or, more correctly, the too slow process of dying … But whatever may be the circumstances of my death I shall die with unshaken faith in the communist future. This faith in man and in his future gives me even now such power of resistance as cannot be given by any religion.

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