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“The historian who labours to reduce the mountain of the revolution to a few contingencies, stands as helpless before it as once stood the political leaders who sought to prevent its rise.”
― Isaac Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-67

“The whole of history is an enormous machine in the service of our ideals. It works with barbarous slowness, with insensitive cruelty, but it works. We are sure of it. But when its omnivorous mechanism swallows up our life’s blood for fuel, we feel like calling out to it with all the strength we still possess: "Faster! Do it faster!”
― Leon Trotsky

“That so many revolutionary efforts have been frustrated or have proved abortive does not invalidate the premise on which they acted. Men engaged in combat do not take defeat for granted before the battle is joined — it is in the actual fighting that the outcome of the struggle is decided.”
― Isaac Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-67