Leon Trotsky Quotes

There are two classes of women in Soviet Russia. There is the professional class, which has taken the place of the nobility and includes government officials, artists, doctors, composers and writers as well as former members of the old nobility whose sympathy is with the Soviets, and also the peasant class.

Because in Russia you were able to triumph with the help of a large class of poor peasants, you represent things in such a way, as if we in Western Europe are also going to have that help.

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.

The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental.

What the proletariat needs is a bath of blood.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

The class struggle is precisely that which resolves the contradictions between two opposed classes by abolishing them at the same time that it constitutes and reveals them as classes.

The very mudsills of society. We call them slaves. But I will not characterize that class at the North with that term; but you have it. It is there, it is everywhere, it is eternal.

Fred Astaire represented the aristocracy, I represented the proletariat.

There is no alternative to class struggle.

Well, first of all I think that we have to be careful with terms like the working class, obviously. When [Karl] Marx wrote about the working class he was writing about something much more bounded than we're talking about.

Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time.

The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class.

As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S. Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study.

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

The working class is my home country, and my future is linked with the proletariat.

The working class will not halt until socialism has been realized.

I was working with C. L. R. James; I believed in Marxist ideas about the labor and movement and the workers being the secret to the future. And I learned differently just by being in Detroit and being married to Jimmy Boggs.

Every class struggle is a political struggle

We are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions in a single group, where they will stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletariat.

Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation.

In Russia bureaucracy as the ruling class is master of production and produce, and the Russian workers are an exploited class.