Daily Inspiration Quote by Leon Trotsky

Trotsky takes a slogan usually wielded as a moral hall pass and booby-traps it. “The end may justify the means” is the classic excuse for dirty work in the name of history. His added clause - “as long as there is something that justifies the end” - sounds like a redundancy, but it’s really a trapdoor: if your end can’t be justified, then no means can be laundered by it. The line’s intent is to seize the cynical phrase from both liberals who condemn revolutionary violence as inherently illegitimate and revolutionaries who treat victory as self-justifying.

The subtext is a demand for a moral ledger inside a movement that often pretends morality is bourgeois decoration. Trotsky isn’t renouncing ruthlessness; he’s insisting ruthlessness has to be tethered to a defensible horizon. The “something” matters: it refuses the abstraction of “History” as an automatic alibi, and it dares opponents to name their own ultimate standard. Is the end emancipation, the withering away of domination, the liberation of labor? If so, the means can’t casually reproduce the very coercion the end claims to abolish.

Context sharpens the edge. Trotsky was writing and speaking amid revolutionary civil war, state-building, and factional purges - moments when “necessity” becomes a solvent that dissolves every limit. He positions himself against both pious anti-violence posturing and opportunist brutality, arguing that ethics in revolution is not about clean hands but about coherent aims. It’s less a permission slip than a warning: without a justifiable end, “the revolution” becomes just another mask for power.