Quotes About Revolution

Everything changes you, and you change everything.

Take care of yourself and beware high connections with bastards, because when the revolution comes there won't be mercy for toadying ass-lickers.

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments. [ On Water ]

There was an undoubted affinity in his mind between the two great passions of his life: revolution and good brew. The taste of one immediately brought to mind the other.

He seemed to have established in his mind an affinity between the two great passions of his life – pale ale and revolution – and assuredly he could not taste the one without dreaming of the other.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.' Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

La théorie révolutionnaire est maintenant ennemie de toute idéologie révolutionnaire, et elle sait qu'elle l'est.

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery! Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

und der ganze Erdball würde durch eine Fackel aus Ekstase und Freiheit in Flammen gesetzt.

The characteristics of the dynamics of humpback whale song, evolution at a rather steady rate, with occasional revolutions, match those of human art, music, and literature. In his 1990 book, The Clockwork Muse, Colin Martindale shows that trends over time in human art and music fit with laws derived from what we know of human psychology and the principles of cultural evolution.

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.

Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.

Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.

The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented. This makes it so easy to mistake the mob for the people, which also comprises all strata of society. While the people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob always will shout for the "strong man," the "great leader." For the mob hates society from which it is excluded, as well as Parliament where it is not represented.

We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.

Moreover, as the Smolensk Archive spells out in detail, Stalin's methods of rule succeeded in destroying whatever measure of competence and technical know-how the country had acquired after the October Revolution.

While the people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob always will shout for for the 'strong man', the 'great leader'.

Since violence—as distinct from power, force, or strength—always needs implements (as Engels pointed out long ago),2 the revolution of technology, a revolution in toolmaking, was especially marked in warfare.

Just as the most lasting result of imperialist expansion was the export of the idea of the nation-state to the four corners of the earth, so the end of imperialism under the pressure of nationalism has led to the dissemination of the idea of revolution all over the globe.

Whatever the French Revolution did and did not achieve—and it did not achieve human equality—it liberated the poor from obscurity, from nonvisibility. What has seemed irrevocable ever since is that those who were devoted to freedom could remain reconciled to a state of affairs in which freedom from want—the freedom to be free—was a privilege of the few.

The word 'revolutionary' can be applied only to revolutions whose aim is freedom.

The fact that the word revolution originally meant restoration is more than a mere oddity of semantics.

The complexity comes when revolution is concerned with both liberation and freedom, and, since liberation is indeed a condition of freedom—though freedom is by no means a necessary result of liberation—it is difficult to see and say where the desire for liberation, to be free from oppression, ends, and the desire for freedom, to live a political life, begins.

No revolution, no matter how wide it opened its gates to the masses and the downtrodden—les malheureux, les misérables, les damnés de la terre as we know them from the grand rhetoric of the French Revolution—was ever started by them.