Leon Trotsky on experience

Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one’s enemies.

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Stalinism and fascism, in spite of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of their features they show a deadly similarity.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Mark Twain1835–1910

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

Mark Twain1835–1910

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Aldous Huxley1894–1963Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 5