Time & Perspective Quote by Leon Trotsky

Trotsky’s line is a dagger aimed at the comforting myth that more debate automatically produces better decisions. It flips the usual liberal piety about “robust discussion” into something closer to revolutionary arithmetic: in moments of upheaval, time is a resource you don’t have, and talk can become a way of multiplying errors rather than reducing them.

The wit is that it sounds like humility while smuggling in a defense of decisiveness. “We should probably have made” is a sly, almost bureaucratic phrasing for a ruthless claim: hesitation is its own form of incompetence. Trotsky is also taking a swipe at committees and proceduralism, the slow grind of politics-as-meeting, where every added voice can mean another compromise, another misread of the moment, another half-measure that satisfies nobody and fails anyway. The subtext is that revolutionary situations punish deliberation because the world outside the room is moving faster than the world inside it.

Context sharpens the edge. Trotsky spent his life inside movements where factional debate could be endless, doctrinaire, and personally lethal. The Bolshevik model prized “democratic” argument, then demanded unity once a line was set; Trotsky’s own career tracks the perils of being on the wrong side of that machinery. So the quote reads as both justification and warning: discussion is valuable until it becomes a luxury or an alibi.

It also lands today because it diagnoses a familiar pathology: the way institutions confuse process with wisdom, and mistake endless consultation for moral seriousness. Trotsky’s cynicism is blunt: sometimes the fastest route to fewer mistakes is simply making fewer decisions in public.