Great Revolutions Quotes

#1. 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 H. Humphrey

#2. If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States - that is to say, they will owe their origin not to the equality but to the inequality of conditions.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#3. Great revolutions, whatever may be their causes, are not lightly commenced, and are not concluded with precipitation.

Benjamin Disraeli

#4. Like the other great revolutions, an environmental revolution will require sacrifices and lead to enormous gains. It, too, will change the face of the land and human institutions, hierarchies, self-definitions, cultures. It will take centuries. If it happens. There is no guarantee, of course.

Donella Meadows

#5. Great revolutions are the work rather of principles than of bayonets, and are achieved first in the moral, and afterwards in the material sphere.

Giuseppe Mazzini

#6. If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#7. We must not forget that all great revolutions and reformations would look mean and meagre if examined in detail as they occurred at the time.

Lydia M. Child

#8. Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance.

Stephen Jay Gould

#9. There is no field of activity for great men without the coming of great wars, great struggles and great revolutions.

Arthur Desmond

#10. Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).

Karl Marx

#11. The women are very important too, we can't have a revolution that doesn't involve and liberate women. It's so subtle the way you're taught male superiority.

John Lennon

#12. New perspectives give birth to new historic ages. Humankind has had many dramatic revolutions of understanding - great uses of fire and the wheel, language and writing. We found that the earth only seems flat, the sun only seems to circle the earth, matter only seems solid.

Marilyn Ferguson

#13. Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Aristotle.

#15. Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home.

Hannah Arendt

#16. We all rejoice in hearing those 3 words: I love you. Beneath these 3 words are another 3: I get you. It's when we feel understood that we feel most loved.

Karen Salmansohn

#17. I am one of those that always get accidentally guillotined when the Great Day of Liberation comes, because ... I guess ... I am full of parentheses. Revolutions can't abide parentheses.

James Tiptree Jr.

#18. On woman Nature did bestow two eyes, Like Hemian's bright lamps, in matchless beauty shining, Whose beams do soonest captivate the wise And wary heads, made rare by art's refining.

Robert Greene

#19. I believe that she has the kind of magic that causes revolutions and promotes great discoveries. There's nothing I enjoy more than to observe Gabriela in the midst of a group of people. Do you know what she reminds me of? A fragrant rose in a bouquet of artificial flowers.

Jorge Amado

#20. How much do we owe the people we love? Now I would add a follow-up question: How do we cope with the fact that we can't necessarily give the people we love what they need?

Ann Packer

#21. We have a lot of American TV in Australia. I grew up watching 'Seinfeld,' 'The Simpsons' and those prime time TV shows over the years that feature grown-ups and high school kids. We had a saturation of American voices.

Sarah Snook

#22. We live in a nation where corporations are people.

Lizz Winstead

#23. I think a lot of times on TV we see caricatures - that's what's funny.

Mayim Bialik

#24. I am excited about focusing full-time on talking about my job-creation agenda and building a new economy for Washington state. We have a great chance to seize our own destiny, build our own industries, and create our own technological revolutions right here at home.

Jay Inslee

#25. The great Christian revolutions came not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when someone takes radically something that was always there.

H. Richard Niebuhr

#26. I'm a combative person, I know I am, and the greatest thing about law school was I learned to fight with my brain. I clarified something to myself. No matter how much you want to live in the white man's world, you either live by what you believe in, or you die.

Jim Webb

#27. The greatest historical events in the twentieth century - in fact, in all of human history - have been the overthrow of capitalism and establishment of societies run by and for the working class in the two great communist revolutions in Russia and China.

Grover Furr

#28. Europe is a molehill. All great empires and revolutions have been on the Orient; six hundred millions live there.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#29. There are two things that have been happening over the last few decades in my opinion. First, there have been unbelievable, remarkable, pioneering advances in technology and, second, an equal amount of evolution in creativity. These two shifts are meeting at an intersection.

Kevin Spacey

#30. The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#31. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

Walter Benjamin

#32. The discovery that the universe was expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century.

Stephen Hawking

#33. I have felt darkness lead me by the hand
Over the hill to greet the singing dawn ...

Allen Tate

#34. Revolutions come in two stages: the bit where everything gets smashed and the bit where you have to build it again. The first is great fun; the second is so very hard.

Nick Harkaway

#35. In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should point
out to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from revolutions is
not that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny never fails to generate
them.

Pierre Trudeau

#36. Work as we know it now is a very recent historical development. It didn't exist before the great agricultural revolutions that made intensive farming possible about twelve thousand years ago.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi