Top 100 Quotes About Revolutions
#2. Revolutions are spiritual acts. They appear first in people, then in politics and the economy. New people form new structures. The transformation we want is first of all spiritual; that will necessarily change the way things are.
Joseph Goebbels
#3. The wind of revolutions is not tractable.
Victor Hugo
#4. Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
George Bernard Shaw
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. By definition, revolutions are not linear, one step at a time, event A leading to event B, and so on. Many causes operate on each other at once. Revolutions shift into place suddenly, like the pattern in a kaleidoscope. They do not so much proceed as crystallize.
Marilyn Ferguson
#8. Martyrs are needed to create incidents. Incidents are needed to create revolutions. Revolutions are needed to create progress.
Chester Himes
#9. Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together,
Carl Sagan
#10. All political revolutions, not affected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions.
John Stuart Mill
#11. That's how it goes. Meetings in rooms. A little diplomacy, a little give and take, a promise here, an understanding there. That's how real revolutions happen.
Terry Pratchett
#13. Terrorists have failed in what is arguably al Qaida's most important objective - to trigger revolutions.
Gijs De Vries
#14. A share in two revolutions is living to some purpose.
Thomas Paine
#15. At last I perceive that in revolutions the supreme power rests with the most abandoned.
Georges Jacques Danton
#16. 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
#17. We deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions. But the more violent the outrages, the more assured we feel that a revolution was necessary.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#19. Revolutions can, and often have, begun with reading.
The Doctor and the Saint
Arundhati Roy
#21. Revolutions demand enormous sacrifices and, at the same time, create a new need to change the world again.
Friedrich Durrenmatt
#22. Everywhere revolutions are painful yet a fruitful gestation of people; they shed blood but create light, they eliminate men but elaborate ideas.
Manuel Gonzalez Flores
#23. I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
Howard Nemerov
#24. 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 on the human mind.
Wilhelm Von Humboldt
#25. Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.
Gloria Steinem
#27. The beginning of revolutions is psychologically strikingly akin to that of certain relationships: the stress on unity, the sense of omnipotence, the desire to eliminate secrets (with the fear of the opposite soon leading to lover's paranoia and the creation of a secret police).
Alain De Botton
#28. Liberation that raises a cry against others is no true liberation. Liberation that means revolutions of hate and violence and takes away lives of others or abases the dignity of others
cannot be true liberty.
Oscar Romero
#29. Revolution is the accession of the peoples, and, at the bottom, the People is Man.
Victor Hugo
#30. The greatest and most powerful revolutions often start very quietly, hidden in the shadows. Remember that.
Richelle Mead
#31. A revolution was never fought, throughout history, for ideals. Revolutions were fought for much more concrete things: food, clothes, housing, and to relieve intolerable oppression. ... I know of no one, outside of Patrick Henry, willing to die for an abstraction.
William Powell
#32. Turning points in human consciousness occur when new energy regimes converge with new communications revolutions, creating new economic eras.
Jeremy Rifkin
#33. Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.
Victor Hugo
#35. A revolution does not have to eat its children. In fact, it is those who are in power who could very well initiate revolutions. Let us not be old-fashioned and think only of armed uprisings of minorities as revolutions. Any movement that seeks to overhaul established attitudes is a revolution.
F. Sionil Jose
#36. The origin of all revolutions and corruption, and the spur and source of all base morals are just two sayings: The First Saying: 'So long as I'm full, what is it to me if others die of hunger?' The Second Saying: 'You suffer hardship so that I can live in ease; you work so that I can eat.'
Said Nursi
#38. The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties were eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise.
Ludwig Von Mises
#39. There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions.
Raymond Queneau
#40. Revolutions and revolutionary wars are inevitable in class society, and without them it is impossible to accomplish any leap in social development and to overthrow the reactionary ruling classes and therefore impossible for the people to win political power.
Mao Zedong
#41. Revolutions are, by definition, unpredictable. A predictable revolution never erupts. Why
Yuval Noah Harari
#43. Men without hope, resigned to despair and oppression, do not make revolutions. It is when expectation replaces submission, when despair is touched with the awareness of possibility, that the forces of human desire and the passion for justice are unloosed.
Robert Kennedy
#45. In the end, we're just showmen. But, I think that it's an important factor. Not to be anything else but clear about that - for me, creativity is an important part of our evolution. Art has probably done more good for the world than war. But they're equally powerful. They both create revolutions.
Nicolas Winding Refn
#46. The most important of all revolutions, a revolution in sentiments, manners and moral opinions.
Edmund Burke
#47. Historians say that revolutions come in a country not when things are at their worst but when they begin to improve, when an entire generation has been well fed, sheltered, and educated so that it feels its strength in a way previous generations, ignorant, ill fed, and unhealthy, did not.
Mark Bowden
#48. Here (in Thomas Aquinas) is the mind that prepared the way for the scientific and industrial revolutions. Here is the mind that was Catholic enough to embrace any good idea, from wherever it came.
John Mark Reynolds
#49. The discovery that the universe was expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century.
Stephen Hawking
#50. A family ... is a little kingdom, torn with factions and exposed to revolutions.
Samuel Johnson
#51. The nature of revolutions is that they destroy the perfect and enable the impossible.
Seth Godin
#52. Revolutions are like the most noxious dungheaps, which bring into life the noblest vegetables.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#54. No sooner are her glass toes thrust into the mud grave than the revolutions begin. Uprisings, fire and steel. The prince is lynched in the ballroom with the dead girl's hair. Royalty's a thing of the past. The kingdom chooses their monarch.
Naturally, they elect a wolf.
Allyse Near
#55. All bonafide revolutions are of necessity revolutions of the spirit.
Sonia Johnson
#56. A machine for making revolutions is doing precisely the wrong thing at just the right time.
Thomas Jefferson
#57. 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
#58. Geologists have usually had recourse for the explanation of these changes to the supposition of sundry violent and extraordinary catastrophes, cataclysms, or general revolutions having occurred in the physical state of the earth's surface.
George Julius Poulett Scrope
#59. These two revolutions of faith and feminism, though very different, were built upon the same fundamental assumption: every person is intrinsically as valuable and worthy of love as any other.
Helen LaKelly Hunt
#60. But here's some advice, boy. Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions.
Terry Pratchett
#61. Revolutions are defined not only by the ideas that drive them but by the scale of their impact.
Ken Robinson
#62. I'm a student of history. Revolutions only get names after it's clear who won.
Wilson Rawls
#63. In other countries they have histories with revolutions and class movements. In America, people don't like to think of themselves like being in a lower class. They all like to think of themselves as potential millionaires.
Matt Taibbi
#64. Just as the world cannot live on wars, so people cannot on revolutions
Adolf Hitler
#66. There is no field of activity for great men without the coming of great wars, great struggles and great revolutions.
Arthur Desmond
#67. Society is just a structure with no soul. The soul is of the individual. One individual outweighs all societies. And, one individual's revolution outweighs all revolutions in the whole of history, because one man can become the womb for God to be reborn.
Rajneesh
#69. It's just men and ants. There's the ants builds their cities,live their lives, have wars, revolutions, until men want them out of the way, and then they go out of the way. That's what we are now _ just ants.
H.G.Wells
#70. Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.
H.L. Mencken
#71. All revolutions are treason until they are accomplished.
Amelia Barr
#72. Revolutions, we must remember, are always made by minorities.
Peter Kropotkin
#73. We do not believe that the Marxist program, which embodies the continuity of the experience of the actual class struggle and real revolutions of the last one hundred and fifty years, is a definitely closed book.
Ernest Mandel
#74. We are not converted only once in our lives but many times and this endless series of conversions and inner revolutions leads to our transformation.
Thomas Merton
#75. You don't have a revolution in which you love your enemy, and you don't have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it. Revolutions overturn systems. Revolutions destroy systems.
Malcolm X
#76. All revolutions in history have obstacles. There is not a revolution that succes.
Nawal El Saadawi
#78. words do matter. They're not pointless. If they were pointless then they couldn't start revolutions and they wouldn't change history and they wouldn't be the things that you think about every night before you go to sleep. If they were just words we wouldn't listen to songs,
Cath Crowley
#79. If you look at revolutions, revolutions come typically when things are getting better and the people don't like the fact that they don't have more than they already have
Anonymous
#80. 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
#81. The case for industry breakups comes from Thomas Jefferson's idea that occasional revolutions are important to the health of any system. As he wrote in 1787, a little rebellion every now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical one.
Tim Wu
#82. In the presence of ... civil war, to testify to humanity! ... to prove that above royalties, above revolutions, above earthly questions, there is the immense emotion of the human soul!
Victor Hugo
#83. The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#84. No movement for social change has ever succeeded without 'the militarism component' ... Thinkers may prepare revolutions, but bandits must carry them out
Ingrid Newkirk
#85. Revolutionary ideas may be wonderful, but revolutions are nasty. You can't cure a headache by cutting off the patients head.
Joel Shepherd
#86. No evolution is accomplished in nature without revolution. Periods of very slow changes are succeeded by periods of violent changes. Revolutions are as necessary for evolution as the slow changes which prepare them and succeed them.
Peter Kropotkin
#87. It seems that all revolutions end up with a personality cult - even the Chinese seem to need a father-figure.
John Lennon
#88. All rising suns set, Archivist. [...] All revolutions are [fantacy, lunacy], until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities. [...] I was not genomed to alter history, [...] no revolutionary ever was.
David Mitchell
#89. How quickly revolutions grow old; and, worse still, respectable.
G.K. Chesterton
#90. If we trace the history of most revolutions, we shall find that the first inroads upon the laws have been made by the governors, as often as by the governed.
Charles Caleb Colton
#91. It has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments,
Malcolm Gladwell
#92. She saw and marked the revolutions that had been, and the present seemed to her only a point of rest, from which time was to renew his flight.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#93. Revolutions as often take place because the old regime simply collapse out of economic inefficiency and bureaucratic rigidity rather than for the reasons given out by their successors taking too much credit, however heroic their actions at the time of crisis (but so often in the past hopeless).
Bernard Crick
#94. I once dreamed of launching revolutions, sparking movements, mobilizing the masses, and changing everything. Now I've learned the beauty and profound significance of simply loving my neighbor.
Jim Palmer
#95. Feminism is small revolutions, every day
Manju Kapur
#96. The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.
James Joyce
#97. All revolutions devour their own children.
Ernst Rohm
#98. The problem with revolutions is that they always end right where they begin.
Matthew Catania
#99. Revolutions are never peaceful.
Malcolm X
#100. Now since France has three times in sixty years failed to obtain practical results from Political revolutions, all Europe is apt to press forward into new Social doctrine to regulate the future.
Lajos Kossuth
