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.
The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.
Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
Let us not forget that revolutions are accomplished through people, although they be nameless. Materialism does not ignore the feeling, thinking, and acting man, but explains him.
The artist can not serve his struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates the social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.
…capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling.
Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.
In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.
Terror is a powerful means of policy and one would have to be a hypocrite not to understand this.
In the meantime, the first characteristic of a really revolutionary party is — to be able to look reality in the face.
With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in “giving a hiding” to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing them to recognize the new order and to submit to it.
Workers – men and women – of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory!
The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.
Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one’s enemies.
Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravitation.
There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.
The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces – in nature, in society, in man himself.
Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.
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.