Quotes About Revolution

Our assignment was to topple this prudish, judgmental civilization. And it worked.

There are decades where nothing happens," Edney said. "And there are weeks where decades happen," Beth said, completing the Lenin quote that was their coded introduction.

One of the hardest lessons to learn in academic life—and for me one of the most disconcerting—is the speed with which a radical insurgency can become orthodoxy. In just a few years a generation of students championing a dangerous new idea are elevated by an initial success into professorships. From these positions of influence they form a powerful network of academic power brokers, which they use to ensure the continuation of the revolution.

When someone answers a question about the foundations of a subject, it can change everything we know.

Copernicus, 1996). Julian

It is interesting to note that the quantum-mechanical revolution was made by a virtually orphaned generation of scientists. Many members of the generation above them had been slaughtered in World War I. There simply weren't many senior scientists around to tell them they were crazy.

So punk wasn't about decay, punk was about the apocalypse. Punk was about annihilation.

The only time I've seen any rebellion was in the fifties, sixties and early seventies. The rest of it you can keep.

Be as radical as reality.

You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

We must not depict socialism as if socialists will bring it to us on a plate all nicely dressed. That will never happen. Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence. When violence is exercised by the working people, by the mass of exploited against the exploiters -- then we are for it!

Those who are really convinced that they have made progress in science would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for the old.

We shall not achieve socialism without a struggle.

When we say "the state," the state is We, it is we, it is the proletariat, it is the advanced guard of the working class.

Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.

Does not the whole history of socialism, particularly of French socialism, which is so rich in revolutionary striving, show us that when the working people themselves take power in their hands the ruling classes resort to unheard-of crimes and shootings if it is a matter of protecting their money-bags.

Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.

War cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished.

A political leader who desires to be useful to the revolutionary proletariat must be able to distinguish concrete cases of compromises that are inexcusable and are an expression of opportunism and treachery.

It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws. But when it comes it moves irresistibly.

The working class must break up, smash the "ready-made state machinery," and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.

Let the "socialist" snivellers croak, let the bourgeoisie rage and fume, but only people who shut their eyes so as not to see, and stuff their ears so as not to hear, can fail to notice that all over the world the birth pangs of the old, capitalist society, which is pregnant with socialism, have begun.

When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward--or go back. He who now talks about the "freedom of the press" goes backward, and halts our headlong course toward Socialism.

In the two months following the revolution the industrialists have robbed the whole of Russia.