Limited Time Offer
Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.
"A program of "disarmament," while imperialist antagonisms survive, is the most pernicious of fictions. Even if it were realized by way of general agreement - an obviously fantastic assumption!- that would by no means
prevent a new war. The imperialists do not make war because there are armaments; on the contrary, they forge
arms when they need to fight."
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
Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
The principles of liberalism can have a real existence only in conjunction with a police system. Anarchism is an attempt to cleanse liberalism of the police. But just as pure oxygen is impossible to breathe, so liberalism without the police principle means the death of society. Being a shadow-caricature of liberalism, anarchism as a whole has shared its fate. Having killed liberalism, the development of class contradictions has also killed anarchism. Like every sect which founds its teaching not upon the actual development of human society, but upon the reduction to absurdity of one of its features, anarchism explodes like a soap bubble at that moment when the social contradictions arrive at the point of war or revolution.
In a revolutionary period, the party which has been thrown from power, which does not reconcile itself with the stability of the ruling class, and which proves this by its desperate struggle against the latter, cannot be terrorized by the threat of imprisonment, as it does not believe in its duration. It is just this simple but decisive fact that explains the widespread recourse to shooting in a civil war.
Enjoy ad-free browsing, unlimited collections, and advanced search features with Premium.