Quotes About Revolution

We believe that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 culminates the era of the nation-state, a peculiar two-hundred-year phase in history that began with the French Revolution.

Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process.

Every social system, however strongly or weakly it clings to power, pretends that its rules will never be superseded.

IBM had its origins in Jacquard's endeavours in Revolutionary France. And indeed IBM is, indeed, a direct descendant of the work that went on in Jacquard's workshop during the last years of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth.

Greatness, in the last analysis, is largely bravery - courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards and respectable ways of doing things.

No, men and women of the Irish race, we shall not fight for England. We shall fight for the destruction of the British Empire and the construction of an Irish republic.

We decry violence all the time in this country, but look at our history. We were born in a violent revolution, and we've been in wars ever since. We're not a pacific people.

We decry violence all the time in this country, but look at our history. We were born in a violent revolution, and we've been in wars ever since. We're not a pacific people.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security —

In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example and France has followed it, of charters of power granted by liberty. This revolution in the practice of the world may, with an honest praise, be pronounced the most triumphant epoch of its history and the most consoling presage of its happiness.

In the weeks leading up to his arrival by train in Pittsburgh, Alexander Berkman had been obsessed with the escalating drama at Homestead. He was living with his partner and lover, the anarchist Emma Goldman, in the New England factory town of Worcester, Massachusetts. By day the couple earned a living serving sandwiches and scooping ice cream in a small diner. By night, they made love and dreamed of revolution.

Nobody is born a Bolshevik. It has to be learned. And it cannot be learned solely from books either. It is learned, over a long time, by a combination of field work, struggle, personal sacrifices, tests, study, and discussion. The making of a Bolshevik is a long, drawn-out process. But in compensation, when you get a Bolshevik, you have got something. When you get enough of them you can do anything you want to do, including making a revolution.

What Copernicus dispelled, however, were not myths but other explanations.

The Great Stagnation

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present," he told Congress. "As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.

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.

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are *equipped.* Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we -- we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything. ...You, running about playing at revolutions, playing little games, thinking you're important. You're just peasants, you'll never *do* anything.

At the end of a century of grand revolutionary romanticism; frightful sacrifices for the sake of paradises and heavens on earth and the withering away of the state; passionate dreams of Utopias and wonderlands and perfect cities; attempts at communes and commonwealths, at co-operatives and kibbutzes and kolkhozes – after all this, would any of us have believed that most people in the world would settle gratefully for a little honesty, a little competence in government?

Now he drops his self-parody and says with great seriousness: "My dear Ella, don't you know what the great revolution of our time is? The Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution—they're nothing at all. The real revolution is, women against men.

We wanted a feminist revolution. I wanted it like a lover. I wanted it like justice.

Shulamith Firestone

The world is a new place, but it still needs to be remade. We still need revolutionaries.

Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single statement took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferences got held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of math was put back by years. Slowly

Every new development that arises is like the shake you give to a kaleidoscope—the thing changes entirely in aspect.