Revolution Quotes

We get called dishonoring for pointing out the garbage in the church, yet nobody ever seems to think it's dishonoring that somebody put the garbage there in the first place.

~ D.r. Silva

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

~ Mao Zedong

We must overturn so many idols, the idol of self first of all, so that we can be humble, and only from our humility can learn to be redeemers, can learn to work together in the way the world really needs. Liberation that raises a cry against others is no true liberation. Liberation that means revolutions of hate and violence and takes away lives of others or abases the dignity of others cannot be true liberty. True liberty does violence to self and, like Christ, who disregarded that he was sovereign becomes a slave to serve others.

~ Oscar A. Romero

Revolution does have to be violent precisely because the Pharaoh won't let you go. If the Pharaoh would let you go, the revolution won't have to be violent.

~ Michael Hardt

No party has renounced the right to armed resistance, in certain circumstances without lying

~ Friedrich Engels

So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people.

~ Howard Zinn

Violent revolution fails because it is not revolutionary enough. It changes the rulers but not the rules, the ends but not the means. Most of the old androcratic values and delusional assumptions remain intact.

~ Walter Wink

Every rock or molotov cocktail thrown should make a very obvious political point. Random violence produces random propaganda results. Why waste even a rock?

~ Abbie Hoffman

We agreed that at least to some extent the whole punk movement is based on the Buddha's 1st noble truth of suffering & the dissatisfactory nature of the material world. The punks see through the lies of society & the oppressive dictates of modern consumer culture. Very few punks though seem to take it further & attempt to understand the causes & conditions of the suffering & falsehoods, unfortunately punks rarely come around to seeing that there is actually a solution & a path to personal freedom. My own life's experience w/ both Dharma practice & punk rock inspired me to try to bridge the gap between the two. I've tried to help point out the similarities, while also acknowledging the differences, & to show those of my generation who are interested that they can practice meditation & find there the freedom we have been seeking in our rebellion against the system.

~ Noah Levine

Don't just survive while waiting for someone's revolution to clear your head.

~ Hakim Bey

Multiculturalism destroys the true diversity which nature requires for the continued evolution of the species through the natural selection process of differentiation and competition between specialized populations within a group.

~ Billy Roper

Mankind soon will be forced to utilize a kind of technology that's still rejected by current civilization.

~ Toba Beta

A man doesn't have to be alive to start the fires of revolution.

~ Karen Hancock

I don't have a life of my own. I've put myself and my life at the service of the people. If necessity dictates I run, I run.. go to jail, I go to jail.. die, I die.My private aspirations are exactly the general aspirations of the people.

~ Yusuf Idris

On the Russian revolutionaries:To leave your parents, faithful and loyal subjects of the Emperor, to leave your profession, to desist from having children, to lose your fortune, and to give up your civil honor, all for revolutionary conviction, makes for a league of more practical proof than any religious order.

~ Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

He suddenly understood the message of so many spiritual teachers that the only revolution that can work is the inner transformation of every human being.

~ Stanislav Grof

What presents itself to us as bourgeois legality is nothing but the violence of the ruling class, a violence raised to an obligatory norm from the outset.

~ Rosa Luxemburg

The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.

~ Russell Kirk

Laugh and cry and tell stories. Sad stories about bodies stolen, bodies no longer here. Enraging stories about the false images, devastating lies, untold violence. Bold, brash stories about reclaiming our bodies and changing the world.

~ Eli Clare

To all the revolutionaries fighting to throw off the yoke of tyranny around the world: look at British democracy. Is that what you want?

~ Andy Zaltzman

A democracy can only be produced if a majority movement is built. The guerilla strategy depends on a collapse of will in the ruling class to produce the social crisis out of which revolution occurs, whether the majority favors it or not.

~ Anarchist Communist Collective

Democracy is a cry of war; it is the flag of the party of numbers placed below raised against those above. A flag sometimes raised in the name of the rights of men, but sometimes in the name of crude passions; sometimes raised against the most iniquitous usurpations but also sometimes against legitimate superiority.

~ François Guizot

Now, these eager and apprehensive men of small property constitute the class which is constantly increased by the equality of conditions. Hence, in democratic communities, the majority of the people do not clearly see what they have to gain by a revolution, but they continually and in a thousand ways feel that they might lose by one.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere. In this sense we are all descendents of the Haitain Revolution, and responsible to these ancestors.

~ Laurent Dubois

Concerning non-violence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.

~ Malcolm X

I am a descendent of a whole bunch of Black folk who couldn't be broken.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

...she was something more- a force, a stable, familiar force like something out of my past which kept me from whirling off into some unknown which I dared not face. It was a most painful position for at the same time Mary reminded me constantly that something was expected of me, some act of leadership, some newsworthy achievement;...

~ Ralph Ellison

If your house ain't in order, you ain't in order. It is so much easier to be out there than right here.

~ Toni Cada Bambara

White supremacy is a black person telling the people of Baltimore to chill out and try peace, thinking they came up with that thought all on their own.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

No genuine revolutionary challenge to either the State or Capitalism in the United States can fail to ignore racism's importance in maintaining the current system.

~ Curious George Brigade

And all Negroes at some period of their lives there is that yearning for a sense of group unity that is the yearning of men for a flag: for a unity that cannot be compromised, that cannot be bought; that is conscious of itself, of its strength, that is militant.

~ Ralph Ellison

Jesus didn't die as a frustrated failed revolutionary. His death was the revolution.

~ William H. Willimon

The degeneration of the revolution in Russia does not pass from the revolution for communism to the revolution for a developed kind of capitalism, but to a pure capitalist revo­lution. It runs in parallel with world-wide capitalist domination which, by successive steps, eliminates old feudal and Asiatic forms in various zones. While the historical situation in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused the capitalist revolution to take liberal forms, in the twentieth century it must have totalitarian and bureaucratic ones.

~ Amadeo Bordiga

If the authorities under various false pretenses, continue curtailing the rights of citizens, so that they merely become serfs to a handful of multinational companies, a global rebellion of ordinary people against super capitalism is certainly not inconceivable.

~ A.j. Beirens

The collective impact of these failures has been a complete erosion of ethical standards, ultimately leading to a novel system we still call Capitalism, but which is tantamount to economic slavery. In this system—our system—the slaves are unaware both of their status and of their masters, who exist in a world apart where the intangible shackles are carefully hidden amongst reams of unreachable legalese.

~ John Doe

I was happiest when I was working for myself. Setting my own goals. Improving my own skills… Take control of your world.

~ Warren Ellis

So it’s democracy versus capitalism at this point, friends, and we out on this frontier outpost of the human world are perhaps better positioned than anyone else to see this and to fight this global battle, there’s empty land here, there’s scarce and nonrenewable resources here, and we’re going to get swept up into the fight and we cannot choose not to be part of it, we are one of the prizes and our fate will be decided by what happens throughout the human world. That being the case, we had better band together for the common good, for Mars and for us and for all the people on earth and for the seven generations, it’s going to be hard it’s going to take years, and the stronger we are the better our chances, which is why I’m so happy to see that burning meteor in the sky pumping the matrix of life into our world, and why I’m so happy to see you all here to celebrate it together, a representative congress of all that I love in this world, but look I think that steel-drum band is ready to play aren’t you” (shouts of assent) “so why don’t you folks start and we’ll dance till dawn and tomorrow scatter on the winds and down the sides of this great mountain, to carry the gift everywhere.

~ Kim Stanley Robinson

These are burning times. And they call for Burning Women. Women embodied in their passion. Woman feeling in their bodies. Creative women. Courageous women. Women who have learned to run on a different power source to the world which is falling into flames around her. She has already disentangled herself from the wreckage of the patriarchal culture, so she will not be dazed, confused and disorientated by the systemic changes happening around her. Centred within herself, receptive to the Earth beyond her, she knows how to cultivate from the ashes, she knows how to find the embers to fuel the new fire.Burning Women arise.Our time is now.Our time has come.

~ Lucy H. Pearce

P26 - Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.

~ Paulo Freire

What a revolution in her ideas!

~ Jane Austen