Quotes About Revolution

Revolution must be distinguished from revolt, coup d'état, palace takeover. A coup or a palace takeover may be planned, but a revolution—never. Its outbreak, the hour of that outbreak, takes everyone, even those who have been striving for it, unawares. They stand amazed at the spontaneity that appears suddenly and destroys everything in its path. It demolishes so ruthlessly that in the end it may annihilate the ideals that called it into being.

The causes of a revolution are usually sought in objective conditions--general poverty, oppression, scandalous abuses. But this view, while correct, is one-sided. After all, such conditions exist in a hundred countries, but revolutions erupt rarely. What is needed is the consciousness of poverty and the consciousness of oppression, and the conviction that poverty and oppression are not the natural order of this world.

Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.

Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own.

I'll tell you a secret about fear: it's an absolutist. With fear, it's all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despot's fall, has more or less nothing to do with 'courage'. It is driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life.

Then a strange moment came, a moment of the kind that determines the fate of nations, because when a crowd loses its fear of an army the world changes.

The system is corrupt, a young man on a bicycle shouted, and if it cannot be changed it must be destroyed. The mastodon revolution is here and you must all choose which side of history you want to be on.

Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own.

H. Ford standing by his assembly line cried out, 'If the people of this nation understood our banking and monetary system, I believe there would be a revolution tomorrow morning.

If the people of this nation understood our banking and monetary system, I believe there would be a revolution tomorrow morning.

By embracing the inescapable, I lost my fear of it. I'll tell you a secret about fear: it's an absolutist. With fear, it's all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with a stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against

I must fight with all my strength so that the little positive things that my health allows me to do might be pointed toward helping the revolution. The only real reason for living.

Dictatorships are never as strong as they think they are, and people are never as weak as they think they are.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.

Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

I think being able to identify with young people and...their capacity to change the world and shake things up. I think that's the greatest strength.

Men who have changed the world never achieved their success by winning the chief citizens to their side, but always by stirring the masses.

Insurrection. An unsuccessful revolution; disaffection's failure to substitute misrule for bad government.

It is not a matter of wishing success to the victim of aggression, but of sharing his fate; one must accompany him to his death or to victory

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

The antidote to stagnation is innovation.

It is a bad year for kings," said Gondy, shaking his head; "look at England, madame." "Yes; but fortunately we have no Oliver Cromwell in France," replied the Queen. "Who knows?" said Gondy; "such men are like thunderbolts—one recognized them only when they have struck.

On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, in which the author of Romance of the Rose was born, appeared to be in as perfect a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just made a second La Rochelle of it.