Revolution Quotes

You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov)

I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

Thomas Jefferson

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violen trevolution inevitable.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

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

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

Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.

Voltaire (FrançoisMarie Arouet)

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

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

Plato

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

Jos

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

Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country's ruin!

Joseph Addison

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

W. R. [William Ralph] Inge

In the relations of a weak Government and a rebellious people there comes a time when every act of the authorities exasperates the masses, and every refusal to act excites their contempt.

John Reed

To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.

Mikhail Bakunin

There is something peculiarly sinister and insidious in even a charge of disloyalty. Such a charge all too frequently places a strain on the reputation of an individual which is indelible and lasting, regardless of the complete innocence later proved.

John Lord O'Brian

Clemency is also a revolutionary measure.

Camille Desmoulins

We must realize that todays Establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution.

William O. Douglas

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

Franz Kafka

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

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

Abbie Hoffman