Quotes About Revolution

Revolutions are first of all ideas.

Alguna vez las revoluciones fueron lo que pensamos que serían?

seized power nowhere, but nonetheless changed everything.

The rights of man" was one of the great phrases of the French Revolution, but it's always been questionable whether it included the rights of women.

Scattered across the Roman Empire, it was only natural for the gospel writers to distance themselves from the Jewish independence movement by erasing, as much as possible, any hint of radicalism or violence, revolution or zealotry, from the story of Jesus, and to adapt Jesus's words and actions to the new political situation in which they found themselves.

The intention of the United States government in supporting Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war was to curb the spread of Iran's revolution, but it had the more disastrous effect of curbing its evolution.

He detested the inefficiency of unregulated capitalism only less than he dreaded the waste and suffering of a proletarian revolution,' wrote Kingsley Martin, who edited the New Statesman when Keynes was chairman of its publishing company: 'he therefore made it his life's work to save capitalism by altering its nature.

agree with Nietzsche that 'The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously.' A joyful life is an active life – it is not a dull static state of so-called happiness. Full of the burning fire of enthusiasm, anarchic, revolutionary, energetic, daemonic, Dionysian, filled to overflowing with the terrific urge to create – such is the life of the man who risks safety and happiness for the sake of growth and happiness.

Lieutenant Commander William Sowden Sims brought about a complete revolution in United States naval gunnery, and from the outset was a powerful advocate of the all-big-gun battleship, with its advantage of uniform shell splash for long-range salvo spotting.

Many of us today owe the few attractive and redeeming features of our existence to the sixties, and Che Guevara personifies that era ... better than anyone (Castaneda 1997:410).

Vive América, Bolívar, y también vive tu espada mientras haya un solo esclavo que te ultraje o un tirano que pretenda profanar la libertad. Bolívar, America Lives! and your sword also lives so long as a single slave rapes your ideal or a tyrant tries to profane liberty. (From A Simon Bolívar / To Simon Bolívar)

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed...

Why go through that stuff all over again? Don't you know the rule: once bitten, twice bitten? But now, I found myself in revolt against my own … what? Conventionality, lack of imagination

This phenomenon, where the losers of a revolution try to demonstrate their support for, and approval of, the changes that have destroyed them, always fascinates me.

Revolutions are usually started by people who are hungry. Sure, there are ideological revolutions, but, again, people rise up because they feel that the alternative is no longer livable. They have to be desperate.

But if you remove a tyrant in anything other than an open and visible way, another tyrant soon stands up to replace him.

MAO TSE-TUNG, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader.

Meetings were an important means of Communist control. They left people no free time, and eliminated the private sphere. The pettiness which dominated them was justified on the grounds that prying into personal details was a way of ensuring thorough soul-cleansing. In fact, pettiness was a fundamental characteristic of a revolution in which intrusiveness and ignorance were celebrated, and envy was incorporated into the system of control.

This was what Moscow had intended: peasants must be coerced into doing things that left no way back into normal life. To "get them to join the revolution," the Party had decreed, "there is only one way: use Red terror to prod them into doing things that leave them with no chance to make compromises later with the gentry and bourgeoisie.

Na verdade, a mesquinhez era uma característica fundamental de uma revolução em que se celebravam a intrusão e a ignorância, e incorporava-se a inveja no sistema de controle.

Above all, her transformation of China was carried out without her engaging in violence and with relatively little upheaval.

Her changes were dramatic and yet gradual, seismic and yet astonishingly bloodless.

For entertainment there were only Mao Thought Propaganda Teams, who sang Mao's quotations set to raucous music.

It's never the changes we want that change everything.