No one revolution up to now has brought all that was expected of it by the masses. Hence the inevitability of a certain disillusionment, of a lowering of the activity of the vanguard, and consequently, of the growing importance of the rearguard. [Joseph] Stalin's faction has raised itself on the wave of reaction against the October revolution.

Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.

Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.

Only the defeat of the proletariat in Germany in 1923 gave the decisive push to the creation of Stalin's theory of national socialism: the downward curve of the revolution gave rise to Stalinism, not to the theory of the permanent revolution, which was first formulated by me in 1905. This theory is not bound to a definite calendar of revolutionary events; it only reveals the world-wide interdependence of the revolutionary process.

It is therefore not true that the mere existence of the Soviet Union is capable of assuring the victory of the revolution in other countries.