Revolution Quotes

There are times when it is conservative to be a revolutionary, when the world must be turned on its head in order to be stood on its feet.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Get plugged in at your church. Find a way to invest yourself. Let's change the church's problem from 'Where do we find the help we need?' to 'What do we do with all the help we have?' The revolution begins now, and it starts with you.

~ Tyler Edwards

The ecstatic vision and social program sought to rebuild a society upward from its grass roots but on principles of religious and economic egalitarianism, with free healing brought directly to the peasant homes and free sharing of whatever they had in return. The deliberate conjunction of magic and meal, miracle and table, free compassion and open commensality, was a challenge launched not just at Judaism’s strictest purity regulations, or even at the Mediterranean’s patriarchal combination of honor and shame, patronage and clientage, but at civilization’s eternal inclination to draw lines, invoke boundaries, establish hierarchies, and maintain discriminations.

~ John Dominic Crossan

By being natural and sincere, one often can create revolutions without having sought them.

~ Christian Dior

What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?

~ Robert Hughes

Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so – otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting and poetry of the nineteenth century. An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent.

~ Robert Hughes

In some way, every creative action disturbs the universe.

~ E.l. Konigsburg

LEFTISTS EAT THEIR CHILDREN: The poets, artists, and radicals are murdered first once the revolution actually comes about.

~ A.e. Samaan

We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

~ Thomas Paine

Most of the mess that is called history comes about because kings and presidents cannot be satisfied with a nice chicken and a good loaf of bread.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

Unjust social orders do no fall merely by appeals to the consciences of the oppressor, though such appeals may be an important element; history teaches us that they fall because a large enough number of people organize a movement powerful enough to push them down. Rarely do such revolutions emerge in a neat and morally pristine process.

~ Timothy B. Tyson

History reminds us that revolutions are not events, so much that they’re processes – that for tens of thousands of years, people have been making decisions that irrevocably shaped the world that we live in today; just as today, we are making subtle, irrevocable decisions that people of the future will remember as revolutions.

~ John Green

The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past, and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Right now, we are in a peak cycle. There’s tremendous energy out there, directed against the state. It’s not all focused, but it’s there, and it’s building. Maybe this will be sufficient to accomplish what we must accomplish over the fairly short run. We’ll see, and we can certainly hope that this is the case. But perhaps not. We must be prepared to wage a long struggle. If this is the case then we’ll probably see a different cycle, one in which the revolutionary energy of the people seems to have dispersed, run out of steam. But – and this is important- such cycles are deceptive. Things appear to be at low ebb, but actually what’s happening is a period of regroupment, a period in which we step back and learn from the mistakes made during the preceding cycle.

~ George L. Jackson

The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doubt on the wisdom of redistributing wealth at the point of a gun.

~ Steven Pinker

Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. History has stopped. Nothing exists except in an endless present in which the Party is always right.

~ George Orwell

We often fear that the Revolution needed is too big for what we can give.Too much change is required inside, outside.And we are too small.But all that is required is that you step into the truth of your life. And speak it, write it, paint it, dance it.That you shine your light on your truth, for the world to see.And as hundreds, then thousands, then millions do this – each sparking the courage of yet more – Suddenly we have a world alight with truth.

~ Lucy H. Pearce

The following is a fictionalized and utterly false account of the events that most definitely did not happen on June 9-10, 1967. And yet, while all the characters in this story are little green men and women running around inside my head, the events that served as inspiration, the historical facts, as it were, must be considered no less than a sibling of the tale contained in these pages: the story I didn't write, but could have written--the book this could have been, but isn't.

~ Montague Kobbé

Poppe, once a leading figure at a scientific research institute, found a job as a swimming pool attendant

~ Victor Sebestyen

She saw and marked the revolutions that had been, and the present seemed to her only a point of rest, from which time was to renew his flight.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.

~ Isaac Asimov

Time and time over it is the ones who try a little too hard to be innovative rebels - and for the sheer glory of being considered innovative rebels - who then turn out not quite as innovative or as rebellious as they would like to think they are.

~ Criss Jami

And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.

~ Saul Bellow

At the root of everything lay the passionatedesire of thinking people to find a simple, unifying norm for society like the law of gravity that Newton had found for nature.

~ James H. Billington

The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.

~ Arthur Koestler

The technological revolution seems to have no higher purpose than to render humanity obsolete.

~ Marty Rubin

She was adamant that any organization that labelled one group of people as evil would eventually do the same to others. That to treat any one person as less than human was to cheapen the very substance of humanity.

~ Samantha Shannon

The essence of the Revolution is to abolish the attainment of unqualified power of man over man either by vote-getting, money-pressure or crude terror. The Revolution repudiates profit or terror altogether as methods of human intercourse. It turns the attention of men and women back from a frantic and futile struggle for the means of power, a struggle against our primary social instincts, to an innate urgency to make and to a beneficial competition for preeminence in social service. It recalls man to a clean and creative life from the entanglements and perversion of secondary issues into which he has fallen. It replaces property and official authority by the compelling prestige of sound achievement. Eminent service remains the only source of influence left in the world . . .

~ H.g. Wells

They took my booksbecause my message was love.They took my penbecause my words were love.Then they took my voicebecause my song was love.Soon they’ll take myselfso nothing remains.But they don’t know that when I'm gonemy love will stay.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Communism was born from a beautiful dream, the likes of which there will never be again on the face of this earth: that there would no longer be lazy men who eat their fill while others work hard and starve.

~ Eka Kurniawan

Every death even the cruelest deathdrowns in the total indifference of NatureNature herself would watch unmovedif we destroyed the entire human raceI hate Naturethis passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg-facethat can bear everythingthis goads us to greater and greater acts

~ Peter Weiss

The moment you cross the border of your country to another, nature will blow you the breeze of revolution, no matter how long you may spend abroad, you will never return back home the same again, it is either greater or worse.

~ Elijah Onyenmeriogu

A societal revolution is politically organic in nature. It can't be engineered. It has to be evolved.

~ Mamur Mustapha

Yes, I’m talking about a non-violent revolution of consciousness. A consciousness that is able to understand how we’re all inextricably connected to each other on this Earth,and to the Earth itself.And that if we violate those fundamental principles, we do so at our own peril. Yes, we can continue to live in this delusion and the denials of reality because it’s painful, it’s frightening. Sometimes, it’s terrifying. It's terrifying to face the truth.So I ask each of you to search your hearts, as to what your truth is, for being a citizen of the Earth,promoting justice as a foundation for peace.It’s not going to happen magically, it’s not going to happen by relying on these political structures and institutions.I think we’re going to have to wage peace in the most extraordinary ways whether our government wants it or not.Without a non-violent revolution of consciousness, we will not survive as a civilization or as a planet.We can choose to have peace if we want to pay the price. And what more glorious goal than peace for all people?...To build a new society, a society that understands that we are not worth more, and they are not worth less.And that we will be willing to pay the price and take the risks to wage peace with all fellow and sister human beings.

~ S. Brian Willson

If you're calling for peace, I am not home.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.

~ Emma Goldman

The Peruvian flute music is . . . cool. In this music, they have not yet invented the industrial revolution that leads to excessive punctuality or the failed experiment they call the nuclear family. This is the music of elements, untarnished, unrehearsed.

~ Kate Braverman

Artists have a unique ability to paint the world, and to help people see injustice. They do it not with guns, but with pens and guitars and paintbrushes.

~ Teresa R. Funke

SECOND SUNSo much bloodHas been spent in this world,But we have not yet built a sun of blood.Listen, my friend,To these trembling words:A second sun will be born of our blood in the form of a heart.

~ Visar Zhiti

I felt the joy of knowing that in some small way I had fought back against someone who wanted to rule me against my will. I said no.

~ Doris Mortman