Revolution Quotes

The revolution is for the sake of life, not death.

~ Herbert Marcuse

Revolutionaries do not only have different ideas (or even actions) from pseudo-revolutionaries. What they are is different, and the way they act is. They do not try to enrol people in order to represent them and be a power in their name ... Their action is never an attempt to organise others, only to express their own subversive response to the world.

~ Gilles Dauvé

Some revolutions resemble restorations, at least at first glance.

~ Luigina Sgarro

If we make a union in these fields, is there anything we can do to ensure it doesn't become corrupt? Or that later it doesn't only look after the people who work here, we just look after our own, and everyone else can fend for themselves? We need to fight for ourselves, here and now, but we also need changes so large and impossible they encompass the entire world.

~ Jacob Wren

Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upward for the harvests of future ages. And very soon their germination would crack the earth asunder.

~ Émile Zola

Everything was burning. Today it was the bodies, tomorrow it would be the spirit.

~ Zhu Xiao-Mei

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

~ Karl Marx

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like... [It] often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. Nevertheless, so long as those commitments retain an element of the arbitrary, the very nature of normal research ensures that the novelty shall not be suppressed for very long... [N]ormal science repeatedly goes astray. And when it does—when, that is, the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice—then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science. The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.

~ Thomas Kuhn

To recreate a new aristocracy is the eternal task of every revolutionary project.

~ Guillaume Faye

An objection was made that judging what had already been done to me, if we proceeded some of us would most certainly be killed. And several others, each in their own language, countered that the way we were living here, the way we were treated, we might as well be dead already, that things couldn't get worse. Things can always get worse, someone yelled from the back, when you reach hell there is always another hell underneath.

~ Jacob Wren

An HBCU that is not inherently revolutionary is irrelevant.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

Imperialism is a system of exploitation that occurs not only in the brutal form of those who come with guns to conquer territory. Imperialism often occurs in more subtle forms, a loan, food aid, blackmail . We are fighting this system that allows a handful of men on Earth to rule all of humanity.

~ Thomas Sankara

Your worst enemy is not the person in opposition to you. It is the person occupying the spot you would be fighting from and doing nothing.

~ Heather Marsh

Between reaction and revolution there is nothing to choose. Neither leave the track, they just allow different people to drive while the same people are run over.

~ Heather Marsh

The principle of laughter and the carnival spirit on which the grotesque is based destroys this limited seriousness and all pretense of an extratemporal meaning and unconditional value of necessity. It frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities. For this reason, great changes, even in the field of science, are always preceded by a certain carnival consciousness that prepares the way.

~ Mikhail Bakhtin

The role of an activist is not to lead the masses with a flag draped around his or her shoulders. Activists meet a few people at a time in a coffee shop to explain in hushed tones why they should believe when no one else does. An activist’s moment is not the moment of change, it is the period when change seems impossible.

~ Ahmed Salah

Which is worse? Lust for the purchasing power of money, or the kind of lust that covets power over others? Let the history of 20th Century socialist revolutions answer that question.

~ A.e. Samaan

Democratic Socialism devolves into totalitarian Socialism and eventually into full on Communism as people resist statism.

~ A.e. Samaan

The abundance of beards in periods of social unrest, times of revolt or upheaval, should be noted. It's the handiest way people have of making themselves mysterious.

~ Mihail Sebastian

As I witness and participate in our visionary efforts to revitalize Detroit and contrast them with the multibillion dollars' worth of megaprojects advanced by politicians and developed that involve casinos, giant stadiums, gentrification, and the Super Bowl, I am saddened by their shortsightedness. At the same time I rejoice in the energy being unleashed in the community by our human-scale programs that involve bringing the country back into the city and removing the walls between schools and communities, between generations, and between ethnic groups. And I am confident just as in the early twentieth century people came from around the world to marvel at the mass production lines pioneered by Henry Ford, in the twenty-first century they will be coming to marvel at the thriving neighborhoods that are the fruit of our visionary programs.

~ Grace Lee Boggs

They call me a tyrant . . . One arrives at a tyrant's throne by the help of scoundrels . . . What faction do I belong to? You yourselves. What is that faction which, since the Revolution began, has crushed the factions and swept away hireling traitors? It is you, it is the people, it is the principles of the Revolution.

~ Maximilien De Robespierre

the sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetting stone of ideas-bhagat singh in court during his trial, india's struggle for freedom

~ Bhagat Singh

Who then shall unravel all these subtle combinations? Who shall trace the exact dividing line that marks off one form of extremism from its opposite? It can be done only by a love of country and a love of truth. Kings and knaves will always try to destroy this love, for they shun reason and truth like the p

~ Maximilien De Robespierre

Dad had turned conservative, but not in the way of the demonologists who sold us out for tenure and crumbs. More like a man who spurns the false talk of revolution for the humbler mission of resurrecting one soul at a time.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Revolution was never sparked by political philosophy. It has ever been the price of bread that shakes the pillars of the world. Yet they lock up the thinkers and leave the bakers free.

~ Rod Duncan

A revolution does not have to eat its children. In fact, it is those who are in power who could very well initiate revolutions. Let us not be old-fashioned and think only of armed uprisings of minorities as revolutions. Any movement that seeks to overhaul established attitudes is a revolution.

~ F. Sionil José

The scars are just something that happened to me. They aren't me. Not anymore.

~ Amy Engel

Make criticism in good time, don't get into the habit of criticizing only after the event.

~ Mao Zedong

When you are trying to do something very innovative and revolutionary, you must also open yourself to a lot of questions.

~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

There was an undoubted affinity in his mind between the two great passions of his life: revolution and good brew. The taste of one immediately brought to mind the other.

~ Guy De Maupassant

I am not going to leave this land, I will die as a martyr at the end … I shall remain, defiant. Muammar is leader of the revolution until the end of time.

~ Muammar Gaddafi

Even in my own time and in my own life, I have witnessed a revolution.

~ Sandra Day O'connor

But to what end? Some... future revolution? It can never succeed.As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.

~ David Mitchell

The more we gained knowledge of these new totalitarian systems of mass-rule, the more we realized not only their similarity of structure, but also the fact that we had to do with a type of dominance that had been known in earlier epochs. We discovered that what the ancients called “tyrannis,” or 'cheirokratia,” what Sulla or the tyrants of the Italian Rennaissance had practised, and what finally alarmed the world in the French Revolution and under Napoleon, had surprisingly many similarities with modern totalitarianism, although this latter had elements with which they cannot be compared, and although it possessed means of domination unknown in past ages.

~ Wilhelm Röpke

The greatest fear of those who rule is not the opposition but not to be taken seriously.

~ Gündüz Vassaf

HOW TO MAKE A REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS IS: educate yourself. On the train, for example, read the same two pages of Das Kapital over and over, willing them to make sense.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Wanting to change only the British position at the top of the American social structure, John Adams feared that a rage for innovation would consume what was worthwhile about American culture.

~ John Ferling

During self-reflection, the realization came that revolution begins within.

~ Amanda Mosher

There is simply no issue more important. Conservation is the preservation of human life on earth, and that, above all else, is worth fighting for.

~ Rob Stewart

This is the thing you need to spread the word about among our people wherever you go. Never let them be brainwashed into thinking that whenever they take steps to see that they're in a position to defend themselves that they,re being unlawful. The only time you're being unlawful is when you break the law. It's LAWFUL to have something to DEFEND yourself.

~ Malcolm X