Quotes About Revolution

This great humanity has said 'enough', it will not soon forget Che Guevara.

Only ten years after the passage of the Constitution, however, what were treasonable or seditious acts remained blurry and more problematic judgments without the historical sanction that only experience could provide. Lacking a consensus on what the American Revolution had intended and what the Constitution had settled, Federalists and Republicans alike were afloat in a sea of mutual accusations and partisan interpretations. The center could not hold because it did not exist.

Taking on Washington was the fastest way to commit political suicide in the revolutionary era.

In the summer of 1776, the average British soldier was 28 years old with seven years experience in the Army. The average American soldier was 20 and had known military life for only six months.

They were trying to orchestrate a revolution, which almost by definition generated a sense of collective trauma that defied any semblance of coherence and control. If we wish to rediscover the psychological context of the major players in Philadelphia, we need to abandon our hindsight omniscience and capture their mentality as they negotiated the unknown.

the Revolution did not produce a single piece of imaginative literature that has endured. The generation of writers who came of age during the Revolution breathed in a supercharged ideological atmosphere; they pressed themselves and their art into the service of their country, only to discover that a republic could be as demanding a patron as a wealthy prince.

The first is the political tale of how thirteen colonies came together and agreed on the decision to secede from the British Empire. Here the center point is the Continental Congress, and the leading players, at least in my version, are John Adams, John Dickinson, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.

For example, the Continental Congress made a deliberate decision to avoid any consideration of the slavery question, even though most delegates were fully aware that it violated the principles they claimed to be fighting for. Adams is most revealing on this score because, more than anyone else, he articulated the need to defer the full promise of the American Revolution in order to assure a robust consensus on the independence question.

It is uncommon for the same men who make a revolution also to secure it.

When Jefferson visited Adams in England in the spring of 1786, the two former revolutionaries were presented at court and George III ostentatiously turned his back on them both. Neither man ever forgot the insult or the friend standing next to him when it happened.

Only ten years after the passage and ratification of the Constitution, however, what were treasonable or seditious acts remained blurry and more problematic judgments without the historical sanction that only experience could provide. Lacking a consensus on what the American Revolution had intended and what the Constitution had settled, Federalists and Republicians alike were afloat in a sea of mutual accusations and partisan interpretations. The center could not hold necausemit did not exist.

American literary culture proved to be less like an explosion that went off with the Revolution than a tender plant that required over fifty years of cultivation before it blossomed.

No revolution that has ever taken place in society can be compared to that which has been produced by the words of Jesus Christ

The thing about changing the world... Once you do it, the world's all different.

Can't stop the signal

The greatest expression of rebellion is joy.

It's not about making money; it's about taking money. Destroying the Status Quo. Because the Status is not Quo!

It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring no police, no army, no guardians of morality, and no government. The old Deity being dead and dethroned, Humankind would come at last into power.

Recent studies suggest we are already in a period of extreme disequilibrium. Over the past 10,000 years human evolution has occurred 10-100x faster than at any other time in our species history.121

L'homme, c'etait Thuriot, un dogue terrible, de la race de Danton; nous le retrouverons deux fois, au comencement et à la fin; sa parole est deux fois mortelle: el tue la Bastille, il tue Robespierre.

If the masses begin to move forward as suggested in this book, neither governments nor industrial systems can check them; all systems must be modified to accommodate the forward movement.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

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.

I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.