Revolution Quotes

Think about it: virtually every atrocity in the history of humankind was enabled by a populace that turned away from a reality that seemed too painful to face, while virtually every revolution for peace and justice has been made possibly by a group of people who chose to bear witness and demanded that others bear witness as well.

~ Melanie Joy

Carelessness on the part of revolutionaries has always been the best aid the police have.

~ Victor Serge

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stood,And fired the shot heard round the world.The foe long since in silence slept;Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;And Time the ruined bridge has sweptDown the dark stream which seaward creeps.On this green bank, by this soft stream,We set to-day a votive stone;That memory may their deed redeem,When, like our sires, our sons are gone.Spirit, that made those heroes dareTo die, and leave their children free,Bid Time and Nature gently spareThe shaft we raise to them and thee.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should pointout to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from revolutions isnot that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny never fails to generatethem.

~ Pierre Trudeau

The radicals assumed that acting was more important than speaking. Talking and writing books, Winstanley insisted, is 'all nothing and must die; for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.' It is a thought worth pondering by those who read books about the seventeenth-century radicals, no less than by those who write them. Were you doers or talkers only? Bunyan asked his generation. What canst thou say?

~ Christopher Hill

Grease the guillotine with the fat of tyrants. Pull the concubine out of the clergyman`s bed. Monarch`s blood must flow, as thick as our boots. From there the free republic will rise.

~ Friedrich Hecker

We seek to uncoverbehind the events changes in the collective consciousness. We reject wholesale references to the “spontaneity” of the movement, references which in most casesexplain nothing and teach nobody. Revolutions take place according to certain laws. This does not mean that the masses in action are aware of the laws of revolution, but it does mean that the changes in mass consciousness are not accidental, but are subject to an objective necessity which is capable of theoretic explanation, and thus makes both prophecy and leadership possible.

~ Leon Trotsky

Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.

~ Victor Hugo

If your regime is not strong enough to handle a joke, then you have no regime.

~ Jon Stewart

Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries.

~ Christopher Hitchens

La revolución beneficia al pobre, al ignorante, al que toda su vida ha sido esclavo, a los infelices que ni siquiera saben que si lo son es porque el rico convierte en oro las lágrimas, el sudor y la sangre de los pobres. || The revolution benefits the poor, the ignorant, who all his life has been a slave, the unfortunate who do not know if they are is because the rich becomes the tears, sweat and blood of the poor in gold.

~ Mariano Azuela

I have always thought that in revolutions, especially democratic revolutions, madmen, not those so called by courtesy, but genuine madmen, have played a very considerable political part. One thing is certain, and that is that a condition of semi-madness is not unbecoming at such times, and often even leads to success.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. 'Of course there will be a revolution,' he said. 'You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope. In fifteen years you tyrants and parasites will be gone. We shall have set up a republic, on the purest Roman model.

~ Hilary Mantel

Everyone ate as a group, and a huge cauldron of dumpster-dived gruel bubbled over a campfire, tended by a grubby-handed group of chefs dicing potatoes and onions on a piece of cardboard on the ground. Huck [Finn] may have been right that a 'barrel of odds and ends' where the 'juice kind of swaps around' makes for better victuals, but it occurred to me that the revolution may well get dysentery.

~ Matthew Power

Egyptians are like camels: they can put up with beatings, humiliation and starvation for a long time but when they rebel they do so suddenly and with a force that is impossible to control.

~ Alaa Al Aswany

Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.

~ Fredric Jameson

What the gods are supposed to be, what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has any news.Those runners gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as if something had just happened. Theyhave not lost the speed and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. In the Catholic Church, which is the cohort of the message, there are still those headlong acts of holiness that speak of something rapid and recent; a self-sacrifice that startles the world like a suicide. But it is not a suicide; it is not pessimistic; it is still as optimistic as St. Francis of the flowers and birds. It is newer in spirit than the newest schools of thought; and it is almost certainly on the eve of new triumphs. For these men serve a mother who seems to grow more beautiful as new generations rise up and call her blessed. We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old.

~ G.k. Chesterton

I stressed that I did not want to be treated like a hero. I was only one member of the revolutionary masses who had fulfilled his duty towards his country. It was easy to write, rant, and mobilize people using the internet. The real heroes of this revolution were the people who had died and been injured.

~ Wael Ghonim

Mubarak was so paranoid that anyone he perceived as competent became a threat to him.

~ Wael Ghonim

in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising.The Second American Revolution.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Every man who has in his soul a secret feeling of revolt against any act of the State, of life, or of destiny, is on the verge of riot; and so soon as it appears, he begins to quiver, and to feel himself borne away by the whirlwind.

~ Victor Hugo

N-no-o, all that excitement, it wouldn't reach us,' Timosha spoke gloomily. 'We're like the sunken city of Kitezh, living at the bottom of the lake. We do not hear a thing, and the water over us is muddy and sleepy. And on the surface, way above - why, everything's in flames, and the alarms are ringing.' (“A Provincial Tale”)

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Revolution? Really, Ono! The communists want a revolution. We want nothing of the sort. Quite the opposite, in fact. We wish for a restoration.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Let them run ahead. Then I’ll have good reason for shooting them down. Sharpeville? Attempting to escape. Attempting to escape from the prison of their lives. That’s the most dangerous crime. It brings about revolution. So, off we go, lads!

~ Derek Walcott

If Lenin would have had facebook, there would never have been any Russian Revolution. He would have had five followers, a handful of friends, and he'd type frantically into his own bubble. If Hitler would have had facebook, we'd still be plagued by a constant stream of conspiracy sites. Damn, how lucky are we exactly that none of these geezers had facebook and meddled about with the world instead.

~ Martijn Benders

This revolution is for display purposes only.

~ Banksy

With a smile of grim satisfaction, he bellowed his call. And the rebels surged forward in an act that would be remembered for ten thousand years.

~ Brian Herbert

Parvus denied that universal suffrage was an end to itself since the middle class would always find ways to manipulate the electoral system. Freedom could not be begged for: it had to be won.

~ Robert Service

The difference between force and persuation is a subtile one not to be drawn by formulas, by force, by science, or textbooks but by men skilled in the art of ruling

~ Crane Brinton

The world is in A major...the earth revolves in A major, a low A.

~ Thomas Ades

He seemed to have established in his mind an affinity between the two great passions of his life – pale ale and revolution – and assuredly he could not taste the one without dreaming of the other.

~ Guy De Maupassant

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

~ Jennifer Donnelly

The Constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and the red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and penal code, the liberté, égalité, fraternité and the second of May 1852—all have vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a magician. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, in order that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: Everything that exists has this much worth, that it will perish.

~ Karl Marx

So, with all this time on my hands, I decided to start a revolution.

~ J.g. Ballard

Almost everyone know the G3 gun. In the hands of the enemy the G3 is used to oppress and slaughter the people, but we capture a G3, it becomes an instrument for liberating the people, for punishing those who slaughter the people. It is the same gun, but the content has changed because those who use it have different aims, different objectives.

~ Samora Machel

Frustrated, El Líder went home, rested his pitching arm, and started a revolution in the mountains.

~ Cristina García

It is unusual,” said Cristina, “for a revolution to call for fewer rights for people, not more.

~ Cassandra Clare

Never mind the stillness -the deep sleeps to

~ Nâzım Hikmet

My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common, when there shall be neither vassal nor lord, and all distinctions levelled; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill they have used us!

~ John Ball

Revolution?” Arno laughed. “What happened wasn’t a revolution. It was a deal. The creation of a new bunch of entrepreneurs who could be more easily manipulated by international capital.

~ Harry Kalmer