Revolution Quotes

Revolutions are not made, they come.

Wendell Phillips

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

For as the interposition of a rivulet, however small, will occasion the line of the phalanx to fluctuate, so any trifling disagreement will be the cause of seditions; but they will not so soon flow from anything else as from the disagreement between virtue and vice, and next to that between poverty and riches.

Aristotle

There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy. Be militant each in your own way. I incite this meeting to rebellion.

Emmeline Pankhurst

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life.

Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suici

You're required to fight the government since they are not obeying the laws of the constitution and it says in the constitution to fight them if they are not.

James Dye

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

George Bernard Shaw

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood.

John Mason Brown

And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.

Terry Pratchett

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

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 are brought about by men, by men who think as men of action and act as men of thought.

Kwame Nkrumah

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 Kapuscinski

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

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

Erich Fromm

The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government, I can not be Silent.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Revolutions are the only way we can evolve coincidentally. Otherwise we'll be held back while the people we need to revolt against do.

James Dye

Every generation needs a new revolution.

Thomas Jefferson

It seemed queer, in the barber's shop, to see the Anarchist notice still on the wall, explaining that tips were prohibited. The Revolution has struck off our chains, the notice said. I felt like telling the barbers that their chains would soon be back again if they didn't look out.

George Orwell

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

John Dryden