Top 100 Quotes About Revolutions
#1. Stamps from Afghanistan are hilarious. You can tell when the revolutions are because suddenly they stop having pictures of the mullahs and the independence monument and they start having fish on them.
Samuel West
#2. Great revolutions, whatever may be their causes, are not lightly commenced, and are not concluded with precipitation.
Benjamin Disraeli
#3. 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
#4. Fashion is not just about trends. It's about political history. You can trace it from the ancient Romans to probably until the '80s, and you can see defining moments that were due either to revolutions or changes in politics.
Daphne Guinness
#5. From Gandhi to Mandela, from the American patriot to the Polish shipbuilders, the makers of revolutions have not come from the top.
Gary Hamel
#6. Waste no time with revolutions that do not remove the causes of your complaints but simply change the faces of those in charge.
Francesco Guicciardini
#7. A revolution is sometimes necessary, but if revolutions become habitual the country in which they take place is going down-hill
Theodore Roosevelt
#8. Progress comes by experiment, and this from ennui that leads to voyages, wars, revolutions, and plainly to change in the arts of expression; that cries out to the imagination, and is the nurse of the invention whereof we term necessity the mother.
Edmund Clarence Stedman
#9. Revolution? Unscrew the flag-staff, wrap the bunting in the oil covers, and put the thing in the clothes-chest. Let the old lady bring you your house-slippers and untie your fiery red necktie. You always make revolutions with your mugs, your republic
nothing but an industrial accident.
Alfred Doblin
#10. The revolutions of the twentieth century, the liberation of the masses by production, created private life but gave nothing to fill it with.
Saul Bellow
#11. Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous.
Pierre Boulez
#12. Pages on Facebook are allowed to be anonymous. That is really important. People start revolutions; we need anonymity.
Sheryl Sandberg
#13. If the experience of science teaches anything, it's that the world is very strange and surprising. The many revolutions in science have certainly shown that.
John Polkinghorne
#14. We don't need new governments
new revolutions
we don't need new men
new women
we don't need new ways
we just need to care.
Charles Bukowski
#15. In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible.
Michael McFaul
#16. Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.
John Mortimer
#17. Looking at the big things that had shaped the nation. Battlefields, factories, declarations, revolutions. Looking for the small things. Birthplaces, clubs, roads, legends. The big things and the small things which were supposed to represent home. I'd found some of them. I
Lee Child
#18. We must remember, elections are short-term efforts. Revolutions are long-term projects.
Ron Paul
#19. I'm guessing that musicals didn't make sense anymore because of the changes in the political environment that began in the late Sixties, an era of self-awareness and social revolutions.
Carmen Ejogo
#20. Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.
Alan Greenspan
#21. Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires.
Socrates
#22. The spiritual world needs two revolutions: One is to separate God from religion and the other is to separate religion from God! This purification process will make God less human and more universal.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#23. Health care missed the PC and Internet revolutions, but it can't afford to miss the cloud and mobile revolution.
John Sculley
#24. [ ... ] ideology was like a set of enormous wheels at the back of the stage, turning and setting in motion wars, revolutions, reforms. The wheels of immunology turn without having any effect upon History.
Milan Kundera
#25. There were two, three or four French Revolutions. Like a multi-stage rocket today, the Revolution involved several successive explosions and propellant thrusts.
Fernand Braudel
#26. The earlier truths are not expelled but absorbed, not contradicted but extended; and the history of each science, which may thus appear like a succession of revolutions, is, in reality, a series of developements.
William Whewell
#28. Hate is able to provoke disorders, to ruin a social organization, to cast a country into a period of bloody revolutions; but it produces nothing.
Georges Sorel
#29. I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.
George Orwell
#30. Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.
Aristotle.
#31. Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.
Hannah Arendt
#32. No one makes a revolution by himself; and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.
George Sand
#33. Even some of the greatest technology-led revolutions, or allegedly technology-led, really were only made possible because of trends already present.
Scott Cook
#34. 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
#35. We should say to the West: "You have been supporting dictators for too many years. Don't expect the people to introduce democracy over night. It is going to take time." It took time with the French revolution, it took time with the Eastern European revolutions. And it is going to take time there.
Tariq Ramadan
#37. Secondly, the nature of the revolutions which have altered the surface of the earth must have had a more decisive effect on the terrestrial quadrupeds than on the marine animals.
Georges Cuvier
#39. Revolutions can no longer be achieved by minorities. No matter how energetic and intelligent a minority may be, it is not enough, in modern times at least, to make a revolution. The cooperation of a majority, and a large majority too, is needed.
Jean Jaures
#40. His eyes spark with revolutions, enlightened trickery and unconditional affection.
Laurie Perez
#41. All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self- justifying
a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings, if only for an hour.
Edward Abbey
#42. Humane people don't start revolutions, they start libraries. And cemeteries.
Jean-Luc Godard
#43. We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.
Eric Hoffer
#44. Revolutions are always easier to admire from across the border.
Mark Kurlansky
#45. Charles Fox said that restorations were the most bloody of all revolutions; and he might have added that reformations are the best mode of preventing the necessity of either.
Charles Caleb Colton
#46. I was naked and he had more possessions than he could use all at once. I was the proletarian, he was the capitalist, and my relations to him were reduced to the basic proposition of all revolutions: die, I want what you have. It was the first time in my life I'd taken an interest in politics.
MacDonald Harris
#47. When enough people realize that they are slaves but don't have to be, revolutions happen.
J.S.B. Morse
#48. 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
#49. I know and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backwards.
William H. Seward
#50. War is unthinkable in a society of autonomous people who have discovered the connectedness of all humanity, who are unafraid of alien ideas and alien cultures, who know that all revolutions begin within and that you cannot impose your brand of enlightenment on anyone else.
Marilyn Ferguson
#51. Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
Karl Marx
#52. 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
#53. And revolutions always mean the breakdown of old authority.
Hu Shih
#54. What has marked Chinese society is its level of cruelty, not just revolutions and wars. We ought to reject it totally, otherwise in another upheaval there will be further cruelty.
Jung Chang
#55. Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#56. All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They've been used to start revolutions and to stop wars.
Banksy
#57. The revolutions of thought which shape the basic outlook of an age are not disseminated through text-books- they spread like epidemics, through contamination by invisible agents and innocent germ carriers, by the most varied forms of contact, or simply by breathing the common air.
Arthur Koestler
#58. In France everything is a matter for jest. People make quips about the scaffold, about Napoleon's defeat on the banks of The Beresina, and about the barricades of our revolutions. So, at the assizes of the Last Judgment, there will always be a Frenchmen to crack a joke.
Honore De Balzac
#59. Right. I'm sure that poor etiquette is the number one reason for most failed revolutions.
Marissa Meyer
#60. Change in my work happens not in revolutions - it's more evolutionary.
Wolfgang Tillmans
#61. If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#62. We had no revolutions to fear, nor fatigues to undergo; all our adventures were by the fireside, and all our migrations from the blue bed to the brown.
Oliver Goldsmith
#63. Revolutions are of no us;, it is necessary to work on transforming the brain: on sowing a different knowledge/awareness, on creating a new conscience, that is like a magic box full of brains.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#64. Revolutions are carried out in order to change the ownership of property and the names of streets. The revolutionary who seeks to change "man's condition" ends up being shot for being a counter-revolutionary.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#66. Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.
William S. Burroughs
#68. I'm not for real revolutions, because they always bring you the opposite of what you want. You very seldom get what you want if you have a violent revolution.
Gore Vidal
#69. All revolutions are impossible until they happen. Then they become inevitable
Albie Sachs
#70. All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
Albert Camus
#71. Revolutions arise from obstinacy. People are dissatisfied with what they are told and they develop new ideas.
Dirk Kurbjuweit
#72. Humanity has experienced many revolutionary changes over the course of history: revolutions in agriculture, in science, industrial production, as well as numerous political revolutions. But these have all been limited to the external aspects of our individual and collective lives.
Daisaku Ikeda
#73. There are accepted revolutions, revolutions which are called revolutions; there are refused revolutions, which are called riots.
Victor Hugo
#74. Let us remember that revolutions do not always establish freedom. Our own free institutions were not the offspring of our revolution. They existed before.
Millard Fillmore
#75. And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective.
Terence McKenna
#76. Revolutions are not made: they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back.
Wendell Phillips
#77. Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
Walter Benjamin
#78. In revolutions the occasions may be trifling but great interest are at stake.
Aristotle.
#79. May I ask how your revolution's going?
Revolutions always go more smoothly around a campfire in the jungle than they do in real life.
Colin Cotterill
#80. Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
Hannah Arendt
#81. Revolutions are not push button affairs; rather, they evolve only if there exists a reservoir of hope and grievance that can be galvanized into popular action.
Michael Parenti
#82. The revolutions of my century, the 20th century - the Soviet revolution, or the Chinese, or the revolutions that were fomented in Latin America, such as in Cuba - failed for the most part, a failure which was completely clear by the end of the century.
Stephane Hessel
#83. Revolutions are usually started by people who are hungry. Sure, there are ideological revolutions, but, again, people rise up because they feel that the alternative is no longer livable. They have to be desperate.
Julianna Baggott
#84. Revolutions can occur only when significant portions of the elites, and especially the military, defect or stand aside. Indeed, in most revolutions it is the elites who mobilize the population to help them overthrow the regime.
Jack A. Goldstone
#85. Studying consciousness tells us more about how the world is fundamentally strange. I think we have a few revolutions to go yet before we get to the bottom of it.
David Chalmers
#86. Revolutions are never waged singing "We Shall Overcome." Revolutions are based upon bloodshed.
Malcolm X
#87. Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.
Albert Camus
#89. In your late teens and early twenties, everything is idealism. Everything should just work in black and white. That's good. You need that. I think most revolutions are started by people in their teens and twenties.
LeCrae
#90. Since Khomeini's death, the popular appeal of an Islamic state - and of fundamentalism - has surely dimmed. Thinkers still debate and warriors kill, but no country seems prepared to emulate Iran. Perhaps revolutions happen only under majestic leaders, and no one like Khomeini has since appeared.
Ruhollah Khomeini
#91. All revolutions are violent revolutions.
Paul Watson
#92. People want only special revolutions, in externals, in politics, and so on. But that's just tinkering. What is really is called for is a revolution of the human mind.
Henrik Ibsen
#93. It is a know fact that almost all revolutions have been the work, not of the common people, but of the aristocracy, and especially of the decayed part of the aristocracy.
Vilfredo Pareto
#94. Revolutions are not about trifles, but spring from trifles.
Aristotle.
#95. Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
Victor Hugo
#96. I'm convinced that democracy cannot be exported from one country to another, like you cannot expert revolutions, ideology.
Vladimir Putin
#98. Revolutions in Prussia are started by kings, and since it is a revolution, it is better to start it ourselves than to suffer of it
Otto Von Bismarck
#99. We believe that this is not right for a democracy to make revolutions the beacon of promoting democracy.
Sergei Lavrov
#100. The strongest affection and utmost zeal should, I think, promote the studies concerned with the most beautiful objects. This is the discipline that deals with the universe's divine revolutions, the stars' motions, sizes, distances, risings and settings ... for what is more beautiful than heaven?
Nicolaus Copernicus
