Life is not an easy matter. . . . You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.
Source: Entry for 5 Apr 1935, Diary in Exile, 1959.
-- Leon Trotsky, (Nov 7 1879-1940), Russian communist revolutionary; He was a communist theorist and agitator and a leader in Russia's October Revolution, 1917.