Joshua Rubenstein > Quotes

“I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the Communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.”
― Joshua Rubenstein, Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life

“He compared the trial to Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Pit and the Pendulum.” “Human nerves,” he wrote, “even the strongest, have a limited capacity to endure moral torture.”
― Joshua Rubenstein, Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life

“Trotsky was rushed to a hospital. When the nurses began to undress him, he asked his wife to do it herself. Still conscious, he expressed his love for her, then whispered, “Please say to our friends that I am sure of the victory of the Fourth International. Go forward.” Those were his final words. Surgeons struggled for four hours to save him. But the axe had done its job, creating a deep wound in his cranium and brain. He succumbed the next day,”
― Joshua Rubenstein, Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life

“The study of Marxism outside of revolutionary struggle can form library rats, but not revolutionaries. Participation in the revolutionary struggle without the study of Marxism will inevitably be filled with hazards, be less confident, and turn out to be half-blind.”
― Joshua Rubenstein, Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life