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Quotes About Revolutions

Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Can you imagine," he went on to say, "what would have been the condition of things eventually if there had been no war, and the South had been allowed to follow its course? Instead of one great, prosperous country with nothing before it but the conquests of peace, a score of petty republics, as in Central and South America, wasting their energies in war with each other pr om revolutions.
~ James Weldon Johnson
No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity. But brilliant young ladies, a little blinded by their own effulgence, are apt to forget that the modest satellite drowned in their light is still performing its own revolutions and generating heat at its own rate.
~ Edith Wharton
Revolutions are matters of constant occurrence in California. They are got up by men who are at the foot of the ladder and in desperate circumstances, just as a new political party is started by such men in our own country. The only object, of course, is the loaves and fishes; and instead of caucusing, paragraphing, libelling, feasting, promising, and lying, as with us, they take muskets and bayonets, and seizing upon the presidio and custom-house, divide the spoils, and declare a new dynasty.
~ Richard Henry Dana Jr.
The 1760s were followed by the American Revolution, the 1850s by Civil War, the 1920s by the Great Depression and World War II. All these Unraveling eras were followed by bone-jarring Crises so monumental that, by their end, American society emerged in a wholly new
~ William Strauss
Modern love is complicated, ??, a term that is even more complicated in Chinese, used as it is for anything too difficult to explain, tackle or resolve, much like the state of our city in these times. Umbrellas foster revolutions and filibustering passes for a political process. To be ?? is almost to deny resolution. Perhaps we are afraid of the possible outcome, and to deny ... what is it we deny? Accountability? Fault? Responsibility?
~ Xu Xi
I hate wars and revoloutions and these dramas of redemptive violence that turn upon themselves like endlessly long screws and haul entire generations through the same murderous absurdities, apparently without ERROR signals going off in anybody's head.
~ Yasmina Khadra
Fantasy. Lunacy. All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.
~ David Mitchell
The big honour of the big revolutions belongs to the high intelligence who design the revolution, not to the masses who support and participate the revolution!
~ Mehmet Murat Ildan
Toate regimurile li se par bune, în afara celor care au c?zut. ?i le plac revolu?iile când ei sunt cei care le fac.
~ Jean d'Ormesson
At present I am chiefly concerned to drive home the fact that it is the great disparity between the rapid progress of the natural and technological sciences on the one hand and the slow progress of the metaphysical, so-called social "sciences" on the other hand, that sooner or later so disturbs the equilibrium of human affairs as to result periodically in those social cataclysms which we call insurrections, revolutions and wars.
~ Alfred Korzybski
At various times during the 1950's and 1960's attempts were made by leaders in Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria to unite as a single Arab nation, but due to the famous independent streak ingrained in the Arab personality, nothing came of those efforts. In fact, the Middle East has suffered from numerous uprisings, wars, and violent revolutions since the end of World War I right up to the present day.
~ Alistair MacLean
Politics, too, is a second-order chaotic system. Many people criticise Sovietologists for failing to predict the 1989 revolutions and castigate Middle East experts for not anticipating the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011. This is unfair. Revolutions are, by definition, unpredictable. A predictable revolution never erupts.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
Historically, corporations were not the ideal vehicle for leading social and political revolutions. A real revolution sooner or later demands sacrifices that corporations, their employees and their shareholders are not willing to make.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
Our ancestors had fought and murdered one another, married and forged alliances, founded countries. At their best - but only for selfish reasons - they patronized art, literature, and music. But their worlds had to be overthrown by revolutions, because there was room in them only for themselves.
~ Andrei Codrescu
No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.
~ Christopher Dawson
Revolutions about taxation have shaped our history.
~ Priti Patel
Even perfection is a myth. There is no evidence of a perfect world, a perfect man or a perfect family anywhere on earth. Perfection, be it Rama Rajya or Camelot, exists only in mythology. Yet everyone craves for it. This craving inspires art, establishes empires, sparks revolutions and motivates leaders. Such is the power of myth.
~ Devdutt Pattanaik
The tyranny of words is only slightly less absolute than that of men; but whereas elections, revolutions, or just the dreary passage of time can do away with human tyranny, patient analysis and redefinition are required to remedy the linguistic affliction.
~ Ernst B. Haas
Accordingly, since nothing prevents the earth from moving, I suggest that we should now consider also whether several motions suit it, so that it can be regarded as one of the planets. For, it is not the center of all the revolutions.
~ Nicolaus Copernicus
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
I've always said - I've always said I'm not, by temperament, a romantic about revolutions or given to revolutions. I've always thought that they are not the ideal way to change.
~ Hisham Matar
Contempt for the dead leads to the disenfranchisement of the unborn, and although that result is not perhaps inevitable, it has been repeated by all subsequent revolutions....Radical individualists enter the world without social capital of their own, and they consume all that they find.
~ Roger Scruton
When the fabric of society is so rigid that it cannot change quickly enough, adjustments are achieved by social unrest and revolutions.
~ John Boyd Orr