Top 98 Quotes About Political Revolution
#1. What America needs is a political revolution.
Walker Evans
#2. What my campaign is about is a political revolution - millions of people standing up and saying, enough is enough. Our government belongs to all of us, and not just the hand full of billionaires.
Bernie Sanders
#3. My hope that Thatcher would inadvertently bring about a new political revolution was well and truly bogus. All that sprang out of Thatcherism were extreme financialisation, the triumph of the shopping mall over the corner store, the fetishisation of housing and Tony Blair.
Yanis Varoufakis
#4. Everyone can have health care. Everyone can earn a living wage. We can educate all our kids - well.But none of that happens unless there's a political revolution. And it's not going to happen unless we deal with corporate control of the media.
Bernie Sanders
#5. Until all women are lesbians, there will be no true political revolution.
Jill Johnston
#6. The social revolution is seriously compromised if it comes through a political revolution.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#7. We neither need a political revolution nor a religious revolution. What we need is an inner transformation in human beings.
Jaggi Vasudev
#8. If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.
William S. Burroughs
#9. I know people want to run for public office, for mayor, for city council. These are people who now want to change the country. Now, getting from here to there, it's a lot of hard work. And I think that the political revolution has just started.
Jonathan Tasini
#10. The American people understand that we need real change in this country, in my view, a political revolution, which says to the people on top, "You know what, you guys can't have it all."
Bernie Sanders
#11. The day that the balance between the two sections of the country - the slaveholding States and the non-slaveholding States - is destroyed is a day that will not be far removed from political revolution, anarchy, civil war, and widespread disaster.
John C. Calhoun
#12. The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty ... Only a moral revolution
not a social or a political revolution
only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.
Simone De Beauvoir
#13. We have got to change the political culture in America. We need a political revolution. That means we are working on politics not just three weeks before an election but 365 days a year.
Bernie Sanders
#14. Together, together, my friends, we have begun a political revolution to transform America, and that revolution, our revolution, continues!
Bernie Sanders
#15. Families are struggling to put bread on the table, send their kids to college and take care of their basic needs. America needs a political revolution.
Bernie Sanders
#16. What if Jesus' secret message reveals a secret plan?. What if he didn't come to start a new religion-but rather came to start a political, social, religious, artistic, economic, intellectual, and spiritual revolution that would give birth to a new world?
Brian D. McLaren
#17. At the heart of every major political upheaval lies a fiscal revolution.
Thomas Piketty
#18. But it (serial television) doesn't remain in the mind. It doesn't produce positive effects in political terms, in ideological terms. My impression is that this extraordinary digital revolution is producing also an extraordinary confusion.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#19. If women want a feminist revolution - ours is a world that is crying out for feminist revolution - then we must assume responsibility for drawing women together in political solidarity. That means we must assume responsibility for eliminating all the forces that divide women.
Bell Hooks
#20. We shall strike. We shall organize boycotts. We shall demonstrate and have political campaigns. We shall pursue the revolution we have proposed. We are sons and daughters of the farm workers' revolution, a revolution of the poor seeking bread and justice.
Cesar Chavez
#21. If there was a spectre haunting France in the 1780's, it was not that of revolution but that of state bankruptcy. The whole social and political structure of France stood in the way of tapping the wealth of the better-off, the only sure way of emerging from the financial impasse.
J.M. Roberts
#22. One does not wait for the "ripe" objective circumstances to make a revolution, circumstances become "ripe" through the political struggle itself.
Slavoj Zizek
#23. Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974.
Jose Saramago
#24. As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.
Thomas Sowell
#25. I do think the Cubans have to change some of the political structures there and allow critical voices, for their own sakes, because unless there is accountability the revolution will totally atrophy.
Tariq Ali
#27. Both poverty and wealth, therefore, have a bad effect on the quality of the work and the workman himself. Wealth and poverty, I answered. One produces luxury and idleness and a passion for novelty, the other meanness and bad workmanship and revolution into the bargain.
Plato
#28. The economic prerequisites for the socialist revolution are fully matured in the US. The political premises are likewise far more advanced than might appear on the surface.
James P. Cannon
#29. Love is profoundly political. Our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth.
Bell Hooks
#30. Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous.
Pierre Boulez
#31. This was an age of utopianism. Political leaders had utopian visions, and so did many citizens, especially the younger generation. The spirit is hard to capture in an age of skepticism, since utopianism, like revolution, is so unreasonable.
Sheila Fitzpatrick
#32. What I always hate is when people call our movement a 'revolution'. For this to be a revolution, we would have to be opposing a standing government. Look around; there is no standing government.
Joe Reyes
#33. It was a particularly interesting and exciting time, and the European political and artistic establishment was turned on by the Civil Rights Movement and the artistic revolution that was becoming a part of jazz.
Archie Shepp
#34. Hitler's economic revolution in Germany had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no role in economic or political decisions.
Carroll Quigley
#35. I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.
George Orwell
#36. The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas.
Carl Bernstein
#37. It is very difficult to motivate people to revolution when they are extremely comfortable and well off.
Neal Asher
#38. If the idea of revolution is to win out, it must be through political enlightenment. It is useless to try to impose it by force of arms.
Sun Yat-sen
#39. It is a mistake to think that the national revolution is only political and economic. It is above all cultural. We stand in the first stormy phase of revolution.
Lynn H. Nicholas
#40. Politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm.
Wendell Phillips
#42. It was the French Revolution that served as the catalyst of this renovation. Its impact was to make the concept of popular sovereignty the new moral justification for the political system of historical capitalism.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#43. Revolution in America begins in books and music, then waits for political operatives to 'implement changes after the fact.'
William S. Burroughs
#44. 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
#45. The Revolution won't happen with guns, rather it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism.
Max Horkheimer
#46. His [Marx's] most explosive and indeed most original contribution to the cause of revolution was that he interpreted the compelling needs of mass poverty in political terms as an uprising, not for the sake of bread or wealth, but for the sake of freedom as well.
Hannah Arendt
#47. Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
Hannah Arendt
#48. My long struggles as a soldier of the Chinese Revolution have forced me to realize the necessity of facing hard facts. There will be neither peace, nor hope, nor future for any of us unless we honestly aim at political, social and economic justice for all peoples of the world, great and small.
Chiang Kai-shek
#49. An infamous political prison required a revolution as much as a revolution required an infamous political prison.
Tom Rob Smith
#50. It's going to be like herding stray cats, and the political leaders who can do it will be remembered as the same kind of geniuses who pulled off the American Revolution.
William H. Calvin
#51. Among those people lucky enough, if you will, to have actually been brought to trial as a political prisoner, several historians have said there has not been one acquittal since the Bolshevik Revolution.
Barbara Amiel
#52. I was born in 1948, so I'm a '60s kid, and in the '60s everyone talked all the time, endlessly, about socialism versus capitalism, about political choices, ideology, Marxism, revolution, 'the system' and so on.
Tony Judt
#53. I'd like political candidates to present their prep plans for the zombie apocalypse, or for the robot revolution, or for when the Internet becomes self-aware, because at least then the debates would be more interesting.
Jenny Lawson
#54. The middle classes, grown prosperous by the belated but staggering development of the industrial revolution and dazzled by the success of Bismarck's policy of force and war, had traded for material gain any aspirations for political freedom they may have had.
William L. Shirer
#55. There is only one revolution tolerable to all men, all societies, all political systems: Revolution by design and invention.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#56. The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.
Jean Baudrillard
#57. But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.
T. S. Eliot
#58. France is revolutionary or she is nothing at all. The revolution of1789 is her political religion.
Alphonse De Lamartine
#59. No real social change has ever been
brought about without a revolution -
Revolution is but thought carried into action.
Every effort for progress, for enlightenment,
for science, for religious, political, and
economic liberty, emanates from the minority,
and not from the mass.
Emma Goldman
#60. To condemn Wordsworth for not writing verse of political and social protest, or for having forsaken the revolution, is to cross the final divide between academic arrogance and moral smugness.
Harold Bloom
#61. I don't believe that clothes can start a revolution, but I do believe that fashion is often a manifestation of a sociological or political climate.
Tom Ford
#62. The 1789 Revolution had given the French a political script of unequalled drama. For the better part of the following century the temptation to reenact the play was irresistible.
Niall Ferguson
#63. Warfare is now an interlocking system of actions - political, economic,
psychological, military - that aims at the overthrow of the established
authority in a country and its replacement by another regime.
Roger Trinquier
#64. With the conception that the Revolution was only a means of securing political power, it was inevitable that all revolutionary values should be subordinated to the needs of the Socialist State; indeed, exploited to further the security of the newly acquired governmental power.
Emma Goldman
#65. If we were to promise people nothing better than only revolution, they would scratch their heads and say: 'Is it not better to have good goulash?'
Nikita Khrushchev
#66. Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favor of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all
Thomas Kuhn
#67. You have to understand that to have a revolution when you are 18 years old is completely different from normal political leaders who were born in a democracy and will die in a democracy and never to have experienced that change. I have seen that change.
Jose Manuel Barroso
#68. Revolution is about the need to re-evolve political, economic and social justice and power back into the hands of the people, preferably through legislation and policies that make human sense. That's what revolution is about. Revolution is not about shootouts.
Bobby Seale
#69. A blind pursuit of cheap popularity has nothing to do with revolution.
[Political Report of the National Executive Committee to the forty-ninth A.N.C. National Conference, Bloemfontein, South Africa, 17 December 1994]
Nelson Mandela
#70. Give us what belongs to us in peace, and if you don't give it to us in peace, we will take it by force.
Emma Goldman
#72. Total revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political and economic system is what interests me, but that's not on the ballot.
Russell Brand
#73. Much of the world today, including the United States, is still living in the social, cultural, and political aftermath of Britain's cultural achievements, its industrial revolution, its government of checks and balances, and its conquests around the world.
Thomas Sowell
#74. Revolution is indeed a violent process. But if it is to result only in a change of dictatorship, in a shifting of names and political personalities, then it is hardly worth while.
Emma Goldman
#75. The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760's was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640's, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.
Bernard Bailyn
#76. Revolution was never sparked by political philosophy. It has ever been the price of bread that shakes the pillars of the world. Yet they lock up the thinkers and leave the bakers free.
Rod Duncan
#77. Political convulsions, like geological upheavings usher in new epochs of the world's progress.
Wendell Phillips
#78. There is little doubt that we are in the midst of a revolution of a much more profound and fundamental nature than the social and political revolutions of the last half century.
Arthur Erickson
#79. Believe me, the intellectual revolution is going on, and that has to come first before you see the political changes. That's where I'm very optimistic.
Ron Paul
#80. Radical feminism, male lesbians, transsexuals, musical condoms with suspenders, and lotsa drummers drumming are all manifestations of a political agenda with roots in the 1960s. This is all fruit we are reaping from the sexual revolution.
Rush Limbaugh
#81. The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.
Pankaj Mishra
#82. More people died as a result of the tiny abortive Easter Uprising against British rule in Ireland (1916) than died as a result of political violence in Germany during the entire National Socialist revolution.
Adolf Hitler
#83. The gang war will never end. Because at it's core , it is not the gangsters against the police or the gangster against another. It is a young man with a Mauser against history personal and political, it is revolution one murder at a time.
Suketu Mehta
#84. Every provisional political set-up following a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that.
Karl Marx
#85. I have learned that a woman can be a fighter, a freedom fighter, a political activist, and that she can fall in love and be loved. She can be married, have children, be a mother. Revolution must mean life also; every aspect of life.
Leila Khaled
#86. I mean, you can't be a revolutionary after the revolution, can you? Didn't we all struggle so that kids like Lil wouldn't have to?
Cory Doctorow
#87. Consider the Essay as a political pamphlet on the Revolution side, and the fact that it was the Whig gospel for a century, and you will see its working merit.
Frederick Pollock
#88. Every rock or molotov cocktail thrown should make a very obvious political point. Random violence produces random propaganda results. Why waste even a rock?
Abbie Hoffman
#89. The French Revolution will be found to have had great influence on the strength of parties, and on the subsequent political transactions of the United States.
John Marshall
#90. For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.
B.R. Ambedkar
#91. It is new design by architects versus world revolution by political leadership.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#92. I'm not really a musician. I'm a performer, and I love rock n' roll. I've embraced rock n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock n' roll.
Patti Smith
#93. Global political conditions make a direct American intervention difficult, but President Reagan's messianic and visceral attitude toward the Nicaraguan revolution could mean it will happen as an act of desperation.
Tomas Borge
#94. I've embraced rock 'n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock 'n' roll. But I am also engaged in all of these things separately.
Patti Smith
#95. People of Haiti, I am the heir to the political philosophy, the doctrine and the revolution which my late father incarnated as president-for-life [and] I have decided to continue his work with the same fierce energy and the same intransigence.
Jean-Claude Duvalier
#96. Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.
Louis D. Brandeis
#97. The revolutionaries failed to institute the novel forms of social and political organization they hankered after; Workers would not accept a ten-day week, or state-appointed priests, or rectangular departements, or the cult of the Supreme Being.
Alan Ryan
#98. A revolution is called for, certainly. But not a political, an economic, or even a technical revolution. We have had enough experience of these during the past century to know that a purely external approach will not suffice. What I propose is a spiritual revolution.
Dalai Lama XIV
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