Quotes About Revolution

The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.

The basis for a successful political revolution on which he had always insisted—the support of existing institutions such as the Army, the police, the political group in power—was now crumbling.

The National Revolution has begun!" Hitler shouted. "This building is occupied by six hundred heavily armed men. No one may leave the hall. Unless there is immediate quiet I shall have a machine gun posted in the gallery. The Bavarian and Reich governments have been removed and a provisional national government formed. The barracks of the Reichswehr and police are occupied. The Army and the police are marching on the city under the swastika banner.

I want now to fulfill the vow which I made to myself five years ago when I was a blind cripple in the military hospital: to know neither rest nor peace until the November criminals had been overthrown, until on the ruins of the wretched Germany of today there should have arisen once more a Germany of power and greatness, of freedom and splendor.

All that serves to precipitate the catastrophe… is good, very good for us and our German revolution.

Soviet foreign policy turns out to be as "imperialist" as that of the czars. The Kremlin has betrayed the revolution.

Without Lenin and Hitler the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions most probably would not have succeeded. Without Gandhi there would have been no serious threat to British rule as the 1930's began. In India I began to see that Gandhi, as Friedrich Meinecke would say of Hitler, was already one of the examples of the singular and incalculable power of personality in historical life. In India it was the only such personality there was.

To (the British), the Gandhi-Irwin pact had merely brought about the end of a temporarily troublesome situation. They still had no inkling of the depth of the Indian revolution that Gandhi was unleashing nor of how it was being kindled by a resurgent Indian nationalism, a nationalism that across the Himalayas was also beginning to stir China to throw off foreign domination, and that one American historian, Hans Kohn, already believed was turning into what he called The Revolt of Asia.

It would be absurd, a ridiculous myopia, to hold up October as a simple lens through which to view the struggles of today. But it has been a long century, a long dusk of spite and cruelty, the excrescence and essence of its time. Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing that we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not always be followed by night.

Through streets Cutter had once known now made strange by mortars, with neglected bunting in the colours of factions, with signs proclaiming idiot theories or new churches, new things, new ways of being, split and peeling. The raucousness and vigour were gone from the streets but still sensible in echo, in the buildings themselves: palimpsests of history, epochs, wars, other revolts embedded in their stones.

Maria Spiridonova

Liberation was fucked up.

In 1964 a coalition of activists, technologists, and academics delivered "The Triple Revolution", an open memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson. The signatories pointed out that "wealth produced by machines… is still wealth", and used this to argue for more a equitable distribution of global profits.

Lenin turned to page 2 of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. There, a short report informed of a revolution in Petrograd. Lenin, too, looked u in thought, his eyes wide.

Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not always be followed by night.

The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don't always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!

British Medical Journal asked its readers to vote on the most important medical milestone that had occurred since 1840, when the BMJ was first published. Third place went to anesthesia, second place to antibiotics. The winner was one you might not have expected: the "sanitary revolution," encompassing sewage disposal and methods for securing clean water. Much of the world, though, is still waiting for that revolution to come.

Why did Park Chung-Hee launch his political career in 1961 by lambasting Korean history? Why did he follow up two years later by saying, "Our five thousand years of history was a continuation of degeneration, crudity, and stagnation" and "We should set ablaze all our history that was more like a storehouse of evil"?

URLs are the 800 numbers of the 1990's.

Come to Me and we will blow the world back together WITH INCREDIBLE NOISE AND FURY.

I am Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg," said the holographic image, who had ink stains all over his fingertips.

Names like Christopher Hill, Geoffrey de Ste Croix, Guy Bois, Albert Soboul, Edward Thompson, James McPherson and D D Kosambi spring to mind.

Es gibt Krisen, die dadurch entstehen, daß sich eine neue Kraft bildet, die zum Sturm auf das Bestehende ansetzt. Und es gibt auch Krisen, die entstehen dadurch oder bestehen darin, daß man sie dafür hält.

Let us kill all the lawyers!