The Best Quotes About Revolutions And Revolutionaries
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A list of the best revolutions and revolutionaries quotes and sayings, including the names of each speaker or author when available. This list is sorted by popularity, so only the most famous revolutions and revolutionaries quotes are at the top. The authors of these historic revolutions and revolutionaries quotes are displayed next to each quote, so if you see one you like be sure to check out other inspirational revolutions and revolutionaries quotes from that same writer.
This list answers the questions, "What are the best quotes about revolutions and revolutionaries?" and "What are inspirational revolutions and revolutionaries quotes?"
This list includes notable revolutions and revolutionaries quotes by various authors, writers, playwrights, speakers, politicians, athletes, poets, and more. Vote on your favorites so that the greatest revolutions and revolutionaries quotes rise to the top, as the order of the list changes dynamically based on votes. Don't let your favorite revolutions and revolutionaries sayings get to the bottom of the list.Ranked by
- 31
Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
Henrik Ibsen - 32
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 - 33
The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
Ursula K. Le Guin - 34
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 - 35
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 - 36
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 - 37
Riots are the voices of the unheard.
Martin Luther King, Jr. - 38
Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.
Albert Camus - 39
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 - 40
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 - 41
You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.
Vladimir Lenin - 42
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 - 43
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
Jean Genet - 44
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 - 45
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 - 46
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 - 47
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 - 48
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 - 49
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 - 50
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 - 51
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 - 52
Revolution today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.
Wyndham Lewis - 53
Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
George Bernard Shaw - 54
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 - 55
Revolutions are always verbose.
Leon Trotsky - 56
Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.
Voltaire - 57
Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrations and revolutionists.
Franklin D. Roosevelt - 58
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. - 59
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 - 60
The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.
Plato