Famous Quotes About Revolutions and Revolutionaries By Reference

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1

A great revolution is never the fault of the people, but of the government.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
2

A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he can't sit on it.

William Ralph Inge

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
3

A nation grown free in a single day is a child born with the limbs and the vigor of a man, who would take a drawn sword for his rattle, and set the house in a blaze that he might chuckle over the splendor.

Sydney Smith

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
4

A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.

José Ortega y Gasset

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
5

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

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
6

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

Alice Walker

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
7

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
8

Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes.

Ryszard Kapuściński

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
9

And then, Sir, there is this consideration, that if the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.

Samuel Johnson

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
10

Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.

Denis Diderot

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
11

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

Franz Kafka

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
12

Every revolution was first a thought in one man?s mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
13

Every revolutionary ends up by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.

Albert Camus

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
14

History teaches us that the great revolutions aren't started by people who are utterly down and out, without hope and vision. They take place when people begin to live a little better -- and when they see how much yet remains to be achieved.

Hubert Humphrey

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
15

I have been ever of opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.

Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
16

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

John Adams

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
17

If not us, who? If not now, when?

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
18

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
19

If we glance at the most important revolutions in history, we see at once that the greatest number of these originated in the periodical revolutions of the human mind.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
20

In a revolution, as in a novel. the most difficult part to invent is the end.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
21

In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a different stamp; some of them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of tradition; others mere brawlers, who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereotyped declamations against the government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off.

Karl Marx

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
22

In revolutions the occasions may be trifling but great interest are at stake.

Aristotle

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
23

In this Revolution no plans have been written for retreat.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
24

Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.

Voltaire

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
25

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.

Aristotle

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
26

It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
27

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose, but their chains. .Workers of the world unite!

Karl Marx

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
28

More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.

Albert Camus

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
29

Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.

George Orwell

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
30

Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

Henrik Ibsen

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
31

No one makes a revolution by himself; and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.

George Sand

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
32

Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts -- it's what you do with what you have left.

Hubert Humphrey

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
33

On the first day of a revolution he is a treasure; on the second he ought to be shot.

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
34

One revolution is like one cocktail, it just gets you organized for the next.

Will Rogers

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
35

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

Raoul Vaneigem

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
36

Plots, true or false, are necessary things, to raise up commonwealths, and ruin kings.

John Dryden

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
37

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

Tom Stoppard

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
38

Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.

Ambrose Bierce

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
39

Revolution today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.

Wyndham Lewis

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
40

Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth. When we open a revolutionary review, or read a revolutionary speech, we yawn our heads off. It is true, there is nothing else. Everything is correctly, monotonously, dishearteningly revolutionary. What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!

Wyndham Lewis

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
41

Revolutions are always verbose.

Leon Trotsky

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
42

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
43

Revolutions are not made, they come.

Wendell Phillips

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
44

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

George Bernard Shaw

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
45

Revolutions never go backward.

Wendell Phillips

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
46

Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.

Albert Camus

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
47

Riots are the voices of the unheard.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
48

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

Victor Hugo

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
49

The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
50

The dead have been awakened -- shall I sleep? The world's at war with tyrants -- shall I crouch? the harvest's ripe -- and shall I pause to reap? I slumber not; the thorn is in my couch; Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear, its echo in my heart.

George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
51

The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.

Harold Rosenberg

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
52

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.

Plato

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
53

The main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wish, and brings to the front men with insatiable appetites for action, power and all that the world has to offer.

Eric Hoffer

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
54

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

Jean Genet

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
55

The more there are riots, the more repressive actin will take place, and the more we face the danger of a right-wing takeover and eventually a fascist society.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
56

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

Hannah Arendt

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
57

The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.

John Adams

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
58

The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free.

Joseph Conrad

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
59

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement -- but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.

Joseph Conrad

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
60

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

Erich Fromm

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
61

The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Germaine Greer

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
62

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

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
63

The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.

Adrienne Rich

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
64

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

John F. Kennedy

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
65

We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation.

Alexander Herzen

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
66

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.

Eric Hoffer

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
67

When people contend for their liberty they seldom get anything for their victory, but new masters.

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
68

Whether a revolutions succeeds or fails people of great hearts will always be sacrificed to it.

Heinrich Heine

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
69

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

G. K. Chesterton

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
70

You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

Vladimir Lenin

Revolutions and Revolutionaries
71

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

Revolutions and Revolutionaries

Showing items 1 - 25 of 71

Famous Quotes About Revolutions and Revolutionaries you can use this list to help make your own ranked list about this topic

A great revolution is never the fault of the people, but of the government.

A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he can't sit on it.

A nation grown free in a single day is a child born with the limbs and the vigor of a man, who would take a drawn sword for his rattle, and set the house in a blaze that he might chuckle over the splendor.

A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

And then, Sir, there is this consideration, that if the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.

Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man?s mind.

Every revolutionary ends up by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.

History teaches us that the great revolutions aren't started by people who are utterly down and out, without hope and vision. They take place when people begin to live a little better -- and when they see how much yet remains to be achieved.

I have been ever of opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

If not us, who? If not now, when?

If we glance at the most important revolutions in history, we see at once that the greatest number of these originated in the periodical revolutions of the human mind.

In a revolution, as in a novel. the most difficult part to invent is the end.

In revolutions the occasions may be trifling but great interest are at stake.

In this Revolution no plans have been written for retreat.

Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose, but their chains. .Workers of the world unite!

More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.

Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.

Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

No one makes a revolution by himself; and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.

Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts -- it's what you do with what you have left.

On the first day of a revolution he is a treasure; on the second he ought to be shot.

One revolution is like one cocktail, it just gets you organized for the next.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

Plots, true or false, are necessary things, to raise up commonwealths, and ruin kings.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.

Revolution today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.

Revolutions are always verbose.

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.

Revolutions are not made, they come.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

Revolutions never go backward.

Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.

Riots are the voices of the unheard.

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

The dead have been awakened -- shall I sleep? The world's at war with tyrants -- shall I crouch? the harvest's ripe -- and shall I pause to reap? I slumber not; the thorn is in my couch; Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear, its echo in my heart.

The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.

The main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wish, and brings to the front men with insatiable appetites for action, power and all that the world has to offer.

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

The more there are riots, the more repressive actin will take place, and the more we face the danger of a right-wing takeover and eventually a fascist society.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement -- but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation.

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.

When people contend for their liberty they seldom get anything for their victory, but new masters.

Whether a revolutions succeeds or fails people of great hearts will always be sacrificed to it.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

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.