Top 100 Revolution Change Quotes
#1. I think our concept of revolution, in terms of getting the power to do things, is too focused on the state. We have a scenario of revolution that first, you know, comes from 1917, that first you take the state power, and then you change things. And we don't realize it's collapsed.
Grace Lee Boggs
#2. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.
Octavio Paz
#3. What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later.
Jonathan Sacks
#4. The world will always need revolution. That doesn't mean shooting and violence. A revolution is when you change your thinking. Confucianism and Christianity were both revolutionary.
Jose Mujica
#5. Sometimes you plodded through life with nothing changing from one month to the next no matter how much you yearned for a revolution to erupt beneath your feet. And sometimes your whole world imploded and rebuilt itself in a matter of seconds.
Laura Kaye
#7. A great human revolution in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a nation and, further, can even enable a change in the destiny of all humankind.
Daisaku Ikeda
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions in the South, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire system, a revolution of values.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#11. 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
#12. Technological change is never an isolated phenomenon. This revolution takes place inside a complex ecosystem which comprises business, governmental and societal dimensions. To make a country fit for the new type of innovation-driven competition, the whole ecosystem has to be considered.
Klaus Schwab
#13. 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
#14. They ask me if I'm going to quit. I thought we were just getting started. We have a revolution to fight, a country to change.
Ron Paul
#15. Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.
June Jordan
#16. We need 21st century programs. We have to change the dynamic because the world - we're not in the Industrial Revolution anymore, where you could leave high school, go work at the town factory for 50 years, and retire with a pension.
Marco Rubio
#17. A great revolution in just one single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a society and, further, will enable a change in the destiny of humankind.
Daisaku Ikeda
#18. Realizing the ways in which we humans may have been inadvertently changing our genes for millennia provides a way for us to begin to think about the inevitable genetic revolution in medicine that is going to allow us to advertently change our genes over centuries and even decades.
Nicholas A. Christakis
#19. 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
#20. They (the French) have taken genius instead of reason for their guide, adopted experiment instead of experience, and wander in the dark because they prefer lightning to light.
Gouverneur Morris
#21. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.
Mao Zedong
#22. 'Revolution' does not necessarily involve sanguinary strife nor is there any place in it for individual vendetta. It is not the cult of the bomb and the pistol. By 'Revolution' we mean that the present order of things, which is based on manifest injustice, must change.
Bhagat Singh
#23. If all properly economic problems were solved once for all ... the social struggle and strife would ... [not necessarily] be reduced in amount or intensity ... in the absence of some moral revolution which could by no means be assumed to follow in consequence of this change itself.
Frank Knight
#24. A revolution is to bring on change and we're spiritual people trying to bring on spiritual change. It might sound like I'm a dreamer, but economic models have reached their height of evolution. Technology has evolved. What hasn't evolved is mankind's spirituality; everything is from 3,000 years ago.
Damian Marley
#25. You say you want a revolution? Well, you know. We all want to change the world.
John Lennon
#26. Roosevelt was the one who had the vision to change our policy from isolationism to world leadership. That was a terrific revolution. Our country's never been the same since.
W. Averell Harriman
#27. Evolution and incremental change is important and we need it, but we're desperate for real revolution and that requires a different type of courage and creativity.
Brene Brown
#28. There are times when it is conservative to be a revolutionary, when the world must be turned on its head in order to be stood on its feet.
Christopher Hitchens
#29. We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla is a social reformer, who takes up arms responding to the angry protests of the people against their oppressors, and who fights to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and poverty.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#30. Communications devices were always used to effect change, to effect revolution. Telephone, telegraph - these all seemed like very big enhancements at the time.
Gary Shteyngart
#31. It takes more courage to disturb the neighborhood than it takes to disturb the universe. And the price is often higher.
E.L. Konigsburg
#32. I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#33. The change in rhetoric has constituted a revolution in how people view themselves and how they view the middle class, the Bourgeois Revaluation. People have become tolerant of markets and innovation.
Deirdre N. McCloskey
#34. Social revolutions and group revolutions are good, and we need that, but we also need personal revolution - revolution within ourselves that change who we are as people.
Ziggy Marley
#35. 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
#36. What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?
Robert Hughes
#37. These things will change, can you feel it now? These walls that they put up to hold us back will fall down. This revolution, the time will come for us to finally win. And we'll sing hallelujah!
Taylor Swift
#38. Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast as, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.
Peter Drucker
#40. 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
#41. Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain.
Stephen Jay Gould
#42. The revolution begins at home. If you overthrow yourself again and again, you might earn the right to help overthrow the rest of us.
Rob Brezsny
#43. People in Detroit aren't just urban gardening. They're starting a new mode of education. They're trying to give children the education to be "solutionaries" rather than people who are going to get jobs in the system. And that is a huge change, a cultural revolution.
Grace Lee Boggs
#44. In the decades following the Revolution, America changed so much and so rapidly that Americans not only became used to change, but came to expected and prize it.
Gordon S. Wood
#45. It's time to make important noise.
Erica Alex
#46. The weapons of the positive revolution are not bullets and bombs but simple human perceptions. Bullets and bombs may offer physical power but eventually will only work if they change perceptions and values. Why not go the direct route and work with perceptions and values?
Edward De Bono
#47. We will have to embark on a change so radical, a revolution so quiet and yet so total, that it will go far beyond the programme for a parliament
Edward Heath
#48. I just think we're living in a time of massive, amazing change, like the Industrial Revolution on acid.
Kelly Lynch
#49. When a pebble is thrown into a lake, everything, down to the furthermost depths, moves with it ... And if, afterwards, everything seems as it was, the level of the lake has none the less been raised by imperceptible, incalculable degree. The old order has been overthrown
by a pebble.
Theophile Thore
#50. Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.
Barbara Deming
#51. I wondered: what happens when a hundred thousand people memorize the same poem? Does anything change?
Madeleine Thien
#52. Believing we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution lives. These changes will end the revolution.
Lawrence Lessig
#53. Revolution? Change? What I really want, with all my heart, is for the atonic clouds to stop greyly lathering the sky. What I want is to see the blue emerge, a truth that is clear and sure because it is nothing and wants nothing.
Fernando Pessoa
#54. What is about to come upon the earth is not just a revival, or another awakening, it is a veritable revolution. The vision was given in order to begin to awaken those who are destined to radically change the course, and even the very definition of Christianity.
Rick Joyner
#55. We need to develop the new green industrial revolution that develops the new technologies that can confront and overcome the challenge of climate change; and that above all can show us not that we can avoid changing our behaviour but we can change it in a way that is environmentally sustainable
Tony Blair
#56. Every successful organization has to make the transition from a world defined primarily by repetition to one primarily defined by change. This is the biggest transformation in the structure of how humans work together since the Agricultural Revolution.
Bill Drayton
#57. Change represents the real spirit of democracy and the real America.
Bryant McGill
#58. But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#59. The main message of Climate Revolution is that climate change is caused by the rotten financial system we've got, designed to create poverty and rip off any profits for a small amount of rich people. Meanwhile, it destroys the earth.
Vivienne Westwood
#60. When we change, the world changes. The key to all change is in our inner transformation- a change of our hearts and minds. This is human revolution. We all have the power to change. When we realize this truth, we can bring forth that power anywhere, anytime, and in any situation.
Daisaku Ikeda
#61. If traditional doesn't work, then traditions won't do.
Max McKeown
#62. You may think things didn't change much after the 60s 'revolution' - but they did. The levels of prescriptive disapproval for anyone who stepped outside the norm receded.
Vashti Bunyan
#63. I want to make a difference, I want to make a change, inspire a revolution, to create, reinvent, and rearrange.
Meagan Earls
#64. In 1986, human nature in America started to change. That year, 'The Oprah Winfrey Show,' based in Chicago, became nationally syndicated, and the country entered the beginning stages of a quiet cultural revolution.
Lee Siegel
#65. This very slight change had worked a revolution.
Victor Hugo
#66. A symptom of the revolution: When we state something is impossible in theory, but then change our minds when we discover that it is possible in practice.
Seth Godin
#67. Anything can change, because the smartphone revolution is still in the early stages.
Tim Cook
#68. There is such a thing as a general revolution which changes the taste of men as it changes the fortunes of the world.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#69. I have no clue if it's true and I don't much want to look, but I bet a war happens inside the cocoon.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#70. History teaches us, however, that when the times are ripe for change and the government refuses or is unable to change, either society starts to decay or a revolution begins.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#71. As far as I can tell, 1968 is a year about change, about revolution, about violence, about people turning inwards as community breaks down.
Matthew Weiner
#72. Revolution is just change with ideological roots showing like bad peroxide.
Kieron Gillen
#73. We are living through the most profound changes in the economy since the Industrial Revolution. Technology, globalization, and the accelerating pace of change have yielded chaotic markets, fierce competition, and unpredictable staff requirements.
Bruce Tulgan
#74. Sometimes it's only the young ones who are crazy enough to change the world.
Diana Peterfreund
#75. James Watt patented his steam engine on the eve of the American Revolution, consummating a relationship between coal and the new Promethean spirit of the age, and humanity made its first tentative steps into an industrial way of life that would, over the next two centuries, forever change the world.
Jeremy Rifkin
#76. I must change in order to change the world. The only revolution with any permanent value takes part in the breast of the individual person.
Stephen Covey
#77. It will be like that until someone decides to change it. All of it. But how did you change an entire culture? Revolutions were about politics, not perceptions, weren't they?
Kameron Hurley
#78. No nation has the right to bring about a revolution, even though such a change may be most urgently needed, if the price is the blood of one single innocent individual ...
Madame De Stael
#79. 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
#80. Only from God does true revolution come ... the definitive way to change the world.
Pope Benedict XVI
#82. The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you'll get action.
Malcolm X
#83. Violent revolutions usually only mean a change of personnel at the top.
Petra Kelly
#84. A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in the race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle.
Kate Millett
#85. Most revolutions start small and simmer under the surface gathering strength, adding to an ideology, gaining favourable opinion- first as a
credible alternative and then as the majority view
Gyan Nagpal
#86. The Earth was singing her revolution. She was calling her brave men and women to her defense.
Rivera Sun
#87. You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.
Nadine Gordimer
#88. The revolution I was starting where I thought I could yell at 200 people in a bar every night and change the world didn't quite happen.
Doug Stanhope
#89. I think that revolution means change. And if somebody feels like there's nothing wrong, everything's great even when it ain't, why would they ask for a revolution? Just stick the tubes into me and just pump away.
Chuck D
#90. In the fluid world of 1919, it was possible to dream of great change, or have nightmares about the collapse of order.
Margaret MacMillan
#91. We must go through a natural revolution if we are to survive on earth. We need to change people's perceptions. If there's no environment, there's no human race. We are in a state of global denial.
Ted Turner
#92. We cannot wait for the world to turn, for times to change that we might change with them, for the revolution to come and carry us around in its new course. We are the future. We are the revolution.
Beatrice Bruteau
#93. Every moment is a fresh new beginning, a wonderful inauguration of the great cosmic journey through the universe. We can do whatever we want. We can change reality at any moment.
Russell Brand
#94. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.
John F. Kennedy
#95. I grew up in Cuba under a strong, military, oppressive dictatorship. So as a teenager, I found myself involved in a revolution. I remember during that time, a young, charismatic leader rose up, talking about hope and change. His name was Fidel Castro.
Rafael Cruz
#96. Social change rarely comes about through the efforts of the disenfranchised. The middle class creates social revolutions.
Faye Wattleton
#97. A revolution is a violent change of mismanagement.
Ambrose Bierce
#98. The world's changed. It's very difficult to know where to be. Because sometimes life is so fast and so absolute that the only way you can change things is by actually shifting your life utterly and totally to a different hemisphere. You can't partially change. There's no semi-revolution.
Cate Blanchett
#100. Wanting to change only the British position at the top of the American social structure, John Adams feared that a "rage for innovation" would consume what was worthwhile about American culture.
John Ferling
