Revolution Quotes

Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas.

~ Bill Hicks

What greater flood can there be than the flood of ideas? How quickly they submerge all that they set out to destroy, how rapidly do they create terrifying depths?

~ Victor Hugo

Revolution does not begin with a group. It begins from the heart.

~ Shahla Khan

Each of us lives with a sword over his head.There are those who can ignore its shadow and those who cannot. Those who cannot are not necessarily better than those who can. But they are the creators of the special myth of their time, because any myth is the creation of the very few who cannot bear reality.

~ Murray Kempton

The risen Christ! Once morefaith is upon us, a jubilant brief keeningwith respite:Obedience, bitter joy,the elements, clouds,winds, louvres where the bellmakes its wild mouths:Holy Rus – into the rain’shorizons, peacock-dyed tail feathers of storm,so it goes on.

~ Geoffrey Hill

Even the strongest blizzards start with a single snowflake.

~ Sara Raasch

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.

~ Vladimir Lenin

The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

~ Thomas Jefferson

You said, 'They’re harmless dreamers and they’re loved by the people.' 'What,' I asked you, 'is harmless about a dreamer, and what,' I asked you, 'is harmless about the love of the people? Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.

~ Tennessee Williams

Revolution is not a one time event.

~ Audre Lorde

Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.

~ Emma Goldman

We are sorry for the inconvenience, but this is a revolution.

~ Subcomandante Marcos

There is no final one, revolutions are infinite.

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

~ Emiliano Zapata

Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.

~ Philip K. Dick

But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is... to tell the truth.

~ Howard Zinn

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly, the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

~ G.k. Chesterton

She's got a big belt around her hips. It has a shiny buckle with PRADA on it, which is Italian for insecure.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

There's one hole in every revolution, large or small. And it's one word long— PEOPLE. No matter how big the idea they all stand under, people are small and weak and cheap and frightened. It's people that kill every revolution.

~ Warren Ellis

Beautiful people don't need coats. They've got their auras to keep them warm.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

~ Huey P. Newton

Give us what belongs to us in peace, and if you don't give it to us in peace, we will take it by force.

~ Emma Goldman

Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare?

~ Jennifer Donnelly

The situation is like this: they hired our parents to destroy this world, and now they'd like to put us to work rebuilding it, and -- to add insult to injury -- at a profit.

~ The Invisible Committee

The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.

~ Abbie Hoffman

And Robespierre, the Incorruptible, who loved us so much he cut off our heads so we would not be troubled by too many thoughts.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

We have been expropriated from our own language by television, from our songs by reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornography, from our city by the police and from our friends by wage-labor.

~ The Invisible Committee

You are asking me to give up everything for a cause that isn't mine. I don't want to be part of any revolution. I just want to live.

~ Sherry Thomas

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

~ Karl Marx

The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society formed upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If we don't make earnest moves toward real solutions, then each day we move one day closer to revolution and anarchy in this country. This is the sad, and yet potentially joyous, state of America.

~ Louis Farrakhan

Yesterday I felt like shit, so I rode my bike around town and repeatedly grafittied “The revolution is not being televised” in paint pen. It was a “pointless” action, but it nonetheless healed me to do this. It was an act of love for that “hooligan” Arundhati Roy. It was an act of self-love. I don’t expect it to change the world, but on the other hand, I know it will.

~ Inga Muscio

Relegated as he was to a corner and as though sheltered behind the billiard table, the soldiers, their eyes fixed upon Enjolras, had not even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat the order: 'Take aim!' when suddenly they heard a powerful voice cry out beside them, 'Vive la Republique! Count me in.'Grantaire was on his feet. The immense glare of the whole combat he had missed and in which he had not been, appeared in the flashing eyes of the transfigured drunkard.He repeated, 'Vive la Republique!' crossed the room firmly, and took his place in front of the muskets beside Enjolras.'Two at one shot,' he said.And, turning toward Enjolras gently, he said to him, 'Will you permit it?'Enjolras shook his hand with a smile.The smile had not finished before the report was heard.Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained backed up against the wall is if the bullets had nailed him there. Except that his head was tilted. Grantaire, struck down, collapsed at his feet.

~ Victor Hugo

You see, gentlemen, they have something to die for. They've discovered they're a people. They're awakening.

~ Frank Herbert

Basically, if you're not a utopianist, you're a schmuck.

~ Jonathan Feldman

In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings--artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery. To relive the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption.

~ Tom Robbins

So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world, that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants.

~ Thomas Jefferson

The right to make revolution is unconditional, for it alone establishes right.

~ Stathis Kouvelakis

Kings may usurp thrones, republics may be established, but the town scarcely stirs. Plassan sleeps while Paris fights.

~ Émile Zola