Revolution Quotes - Page 2

Revolutions are not about trifles but spring from trifles.

A reform is a correction of abuses a revolution is a transfer of power.

A nation without the means of reform is without the means of survival.

Every reform was once a private opinion and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All reformers are bachelors.

George Moore

Not actual suffering but the hope of better things incites people to revolt.

Eric Hoffer

The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.

Alexis de Tocqueville

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots.

Henry David Thoreau

Thinkers prepare the revolution bandits carry it out.

Mariano Azuela

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal and equals that they may be superior.

Aristotle

Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.

Benjamin Franklin

In almost any society I think the quality of the non-conformists is like to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.

Margaret Mead

Whatever little we have gained we have gained by agitation while we have uniformly lost by moderation.

Daniel O'Connell

There is nothing illogical in the desire of the "have-nots" to appropriate the wealth of the "haves"; in fact, it is part and parcel of the law of animal life. The bear robs the hive and the wolf the fold, and when "nature red in tooth and claw" is stretched into its human dimension, there is nothing irrational in Marx's theory that, granted the power, one social class should devour another. But what is irrational is, to assume that by robbing the hive the bear will assume the industry of the bee, or by robbing the fold the wolf will become as pacific as the sheep. It is astonishing that a man of Marx's high intelligence could have believed in ritualistic cannibalism on the social plane; that by wresting the forces of production from the bourgeoisie and centralizing them in the hands of the proletariat, the proletariat would automatically aacquire the skills of the ruling class. And it is equally astonishing that a man of Lenin's mental calibre could have attempted to put this magic into practice.

J.F.C. Fuller

To be a good leader, win minds; to be a great leader, win heart’s; and to be an extraordinary leader, win souls.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Alone a candle can only light a room, but in thousands they can even light a city.

Matshona Dhliwayo

It is easier to kill a million armed men than a single unarmed idea.

Matshona Dhliwayo

We can fight fire with water provided we can get it there soon enough. But often we act when it's too late. The result is splattered in the pages of our history: bloodbaths, uprisings, revolutions, you name. And on it goes. We learn so slowly. After so many centuries, we're still a people who eat fire and drink water.' 'Why bother,then?' 'Because we have to believe that one day we'll learn.

Arlene J. Chai

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

Aldous Huxley

Ok I'm not so smart I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running and it's the working class that get exploited. What kind revolution is it that just throws out big words that working class people can't understand.Revolution or not the working class will just keep on scraping a living in the same old shitholesI'm not going to believe in any damned revolution. Love is all I'm going to believe in. -- Midori

Haruki Murakami

When they began, they could not have thought that it would end like this, because their time seemed to them as simple as a flame. We know now that it was a very complicated time and that they were more complicated people than they knew.

Murray Kempton

Revolution is an awakening, so is the spring! Spring is an awakening, so is the revolution!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Washington was concerned that the soldiers coming to him from Massachusetts were too few and of too low quality. He was disappointed that the majority of the Massachusetts volunteers appeared to be thrill-seeking teenagers, British Army deserters and otherwise unemployed African Americans. Washington doubted that these volunteers would ever be able to stand up to the British. Much to Washington's surprise, the free black men soon proved to be exemplary soldiers.

C.L. Gammon

And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.

Terry Pratchett

Each of you must decide where you stand. All we ask is that you refuse to kneel. You are the people. You have the power. Open your eyes. Open your minds. Then close the fingers on your hand.

Jay Kristoff

A conscience is easier to swallow on an empty belly, simpler to swing with a broken wrist. The people who hate money are the ones who don’t have any. The people who hate power are the ones who are powerless

Jay Kristoff

The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.

Bill Mollison

I have these secret pangs of shame about being single, like I wasn't good enough to get a husband. Rita reminded me of something I'd told her once, about the five rules of the world as arrived at by this Catholic priest named Tom Weston. The first rule, he says, is that you must not have anything wrong with you or anything different. The second one is that if you do have something wrong with you, you must get over it as soon as possible. The third rule is that if you can't get over it, you must pretend that you have. The fourth rule is that if you can't even pretend that you have, you shouldn't show up. You should stay home, because it's hard for everyone else to have you around. And the fifth rule is that if you are going to insist on showing up, you should at least have the decency to feel ashamed.So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.

Anne Lamott

In my opinion, if 100% of the people were farming it would be ideal. If each person were given one quarter-acre, that is 1 1/4 acres to a family of five, that would be more than enough land to support the family for the whole year. If natural farming were practiced, a farmer would also have plenty of time for leisure and social activities within the village community. I think this is the most direct path toward making this country a happy, pleasant land.

Masanobu Fukuoka

Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.

Hannah Arendt

Pioneering is never done in front of cheerleaders urging on a roaring grandstand of popular approval.

George Takei

The emancipation of the working class can only be achieved by the working class itself — without the assistance of governments.

pierre-jospeh proudhon

A new dynasty is never founded without a struggle. Blood makes good manure. It will be a good thing for the Rougon family to be founded on a massacre, like many illustrious families."--Monsieur de Carnavant

Émile Zola

And is it not sects, bodies of definite, uncompromising principles, that lead us into revolutions?

Vladimir Lenin

Lenin only believes in the revolution and in the virtue of expediency.'One must be prepared for every sacrifice, to use, if necessary, every stratagem, ruse, illegal method, to be determined to conceal the truth, for the sole purpose of accomplishing, despite everything, the communist task'.

Albert Camus

Preparation for the future was necessary, and he was willing to admit that the great change would perhaps come in the upheaval of a revolution. But he argued that revolutionary propaganda was a delicate work of high conscience. It was the education of the masters of the world. It should be as careful as the education given to kings.

Joseph Conrad

If there was a spectre haunting France in the 1780's, it was not that of revolution but that of state bankruptcy. The whole social and political structure of France stood in the way of tapping the wealth of the better-off, the only sure way of emerging from the financial impasse.

J.M. Roberts

FAITES L'AMOUR ET RECOMMENCEZ (make love and make it again)

Anouk Markovits

Perhaps I was hosting my own personal sexual revolution. You know the kind that will not be televised.

Sabrina Childress

We all have a revolution inside us. For one thing or another!! It is a nature for us to be like this, we want things to be like God created them to be, and when it doesn't go that way, we fight for our Lord as warriors and soldiers. God is alive and we need him to change this world. Elena~

Elena Toledo

Patriarchy, reformed or unreformed, is patriarchy still: its worst abuses purged or foresworn, it might actually be more stable and secure than before.

Kate Millett

It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring no police, no army, no guardians of morality, and no government. The old Deity being dead and dethroned, Humankind would come at last into power.

Joyce Carol Oates

History respects revolutions; and yet, if a revolution is progressive, support it; if it is reactionary, resist it!

Mehmet Murat ildan

So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we're overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We've gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?

John Cage

If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.

William S Burroughs

No turtle can be a revolutionist, because revolution requires high speed!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Even in the middle of barking dogs, you can hear the footsteps of a big revolution!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men

Victor Hugo

The most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older.

George Bernard Shaw

Among all the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western civilisation ... there has been only one—the triumph of Christianity —that can be called in the fullest sense a "revolution": a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity's prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as to actually have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good.

David Bentley Hart

Revolution must take place within one's own mind.

Lionel Suggs

[O]ne cannot separate violence from the very exist ence of the state (as the apparatus of class domination): from the standpoint of the'subordinated and oppressed, the very existence of a state is a fact of violence (in the same sense in which, for example, Robespierre said, in his justification of the regicide, that one does not have to prove that the king committed any specific crimes, since the very existence of the king is a crime, an offence against the freedom of the people). In this strict sense, every violence of the oppressed against the ruling class and its state is ultimately ‘defensive’. If we do not concede this point, we volens nolens ‘normalize’ the state and accept that its violence is merely a matter of contin gent excesses (to be dealt with through democratic reforms).

Slavoj Žižek

This Revolution is genuine because it was born from the same womb that always gives birth to massive social upheavals - the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations.

Martin Luther King Jr.

We will remember the way things used to be, and teach our children to be better than us. The generations that follow will remember with us. In that day, we will all be free

Rachel Higginson

The revolutionary Terror, which is attacked for its revolutionary tribunal, its law of suspects and its guillotine, was a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty in which the object was to conquer tyranny or die for liberty. This Terror was willed by those who, having won sovereign power by dint of insurrection, refused to let this be destroyed by counter-revolutionary enemies

Sophie Wahnich

His August Majesty chided the bureaucrats for failing to understand a simple principle: the principle of the second bag. Because the people never revolt just because they have to carry a heavy load, or because of exploitation. They don't know life without exploitation, they don't even know that such a life exists. How can they desire what they cannot imagine? The people will rvolt only when, in a single movement, someone tries to throw a second burden, a second heavy bag, onto their backs. The peasant will fall face down into the mud - and then spring up and grab an ax. He'll grab an ax, my gracious sir, not because he simply can't sustain this new burden - he could carry it - he will rise because he feels that, in throwing the second burden onto his back suddenly and stealthily, you have tried to cheat him, you have treated him like an unthinking animal, you have trampled what remains of his already strangled dignity, taken him for an idiot who doesn't see, feel, or understand. A man doesn't seize an ax in defense of his wallet, but in defense of his dignity, and that, dear sir, is why His Majesty scolded the clerks. For their own convenience and vanity, instead of adding the burden bit by bit, in little bags, they tried to heave a whole big sack on at once.

Ryszard Kapuściński

There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.

Victor Hugo

. . . and what are you exactly, my friend? Their subordinate? Their employee? Or, I would suggest, their equal? That's what young Karl would certainly have said, and probably still does. Unless he's no longer alive.' Dodger gave Solomon and strange look and Solomon hastened to clarify. "'Mmmm, as I recall, if you go around telling people that they are downtrodden, you tend to make two separate enemies: the people who are doing the downtreading and have no intention of stopping, and the people who are downtrodden, but nevertheless -- people being who they are -- don't want to know. They can get quite nasty about it.' (205)

Terry Pratchett

A reactionary revolution is nothing but a high-speed evolution backwards!

Mehmet Murat ildan

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Revolution Quotes - Page 2

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