John Gillman

Add friend
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about John.


Loading...
Leon Trotsky
“For the information of these “friends” who consider themselves called to defend against us the role of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, we give warning that our book teaches not how to love a victorious revolution after the event, in the person of the bureaucracy it has brought forward, but only how a revolution is prepared,
how it develops, and how it conquers. A party is not for us a machine whose
sinlessness is to be defended by state measures of repression, but a complicated organism that like all living things develops in contradictions.”
Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution

Leon Trotsky
“The boycott of parliamentary institutions on the part of anarchists and semianarchists is dictated by a desire not to submit their weakness to a test on the part of the masses, thus preserving their right to an inactive hauteur which makes no difference to anybody. A revolutionary party can turn its back to a parliament only if it has set itself the immediate task of overthrowing the existing regime.”
Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution

Leon Trotsky
“Between his consciousness and events stood always that impenetrable medium — indifference.”
Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution

Leon Trotsky
“Similar (of course, far from identical) irritations in similar conditions call out similar reflexes; the more powerful the irritation, the sooner it overcomes personal peculiarities. To a tickle, people react differently, but to a red-hot iron, alike. As a steam-hammer converts a sphere and a cube alike into sheet metal, so under the blow of too great and inexorable events resistances are smashed and the boundaries of “individuality” lost.”
Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution

Leon Trotsky
“...you must remember that the political development of the masses proceeds not in a direct line, but in a complicated curve. And is not this, after all, the essential movement of every material process? Objective conditions were powerfully impelling the workers, soldiers and peasants toward the banners of the Bolsheviks, but the masses were entering upon this path in a state of struggle with their own past, with their yesterday’s beliefs, and partly also with their beliefs of today. At a difficult turn, at a moment of failure and disappointment, the old prejudices not yet burnt out would flare up, and the enemy would naturally seize upon these as upon an anchor of
salvation.”
Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution

year in books
Wouter ...
1,005 books | 132 friends

Kim Lee...
0 books | 71 friends

Nicky D...
231 books | 58 friends

James
238 books | 39 friends

Anthony...
196 books | 79 friends

Andrew
180 books | 236 friends

Deacon ...
215 books | 474 friends

Kade
153 books | 173 friends

More friends…


Polls voted on by John

Lists liked by John