Quotes About Revolution

Une connaissance qui prendrait pour point de départ l'oppression des femmes constituerait une révolution épistémologique, et non une nouvelle discipline ayant les femmes pour objet ou une explication ad hoc d'une oppression particulière.

L'abolition des rapports de production capitaliste en soi ne suffit pas à libérer les femmes ; [il faut] se constituer en force politique autonome.

Church membership at the start of the Revolution was 17 percent, a figure so low that some scholars suggest that schoolroom pictures of early American Puritans going to church ought to be joined by paintings of drunken revelers.

Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.

The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.

One of history's secrets is that the revolutionaries' appeal in the eyes of posterity owes much to the traits they share with the world they overthrew.

Change is not, then, a matter of "magical" thinking or waving a "wand"—it is about pushing ideas, building movements, and challenging the status quo.

If we don't have a plausible plan for making revolution we can be sure that there will be somebody else there who will.

Revolutionary situations do not present themselves to us only after we have made perfect preparations for them. They arise suddenly when the old order is unable to maintain its rule.

A revolution is a struggle for power and is inevitably a messy affair. If we are not prepared for the fact that future revolutionary situations are going to present us with unpleasant choices then we are not really interested in making revolution.

Every revolution arises from the failure of a particular state in a particular moment. In Spain the Republican government crumbled in the wake of Franco's military revolt. Power was lying in the street, and the anarchist movement, the most powerful force among the workers and peasants, took it.

Thoroughgoing social revolutions, even if contained in a single country, are a profound threat to the international capitalist order. Every such revolution that has not been crushed internally has had to face some degree of foreign military intervention.

The simple fact of the matter is that wars can not be won in this way. Militias can play an important role in defending the gains of a revolution, in organizing irregular warfare within a circumscribed region, and in suppressing counter-revolutionary activity within the zone of a revolution. But without a regular army of its own the revolution can not hold back the advances of an invading army.

The 1953 coup was a catastrophe which slammed him [Mosaddegh] to floor, and from which Iran never fully recovered

these boys chipping at the rigidities of social deference, in search of a place, a voice. In Spain too the old power seemed to be dying, but slowly and viciously and, as it turned out, not yet. Nor would it depart in the way scripted by Republican reformers, and not before in its passing it claimed from that generation a barbaric tribute, exacted in the coin of "national cleansing

José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the leader of Spain's fascist party, the Falange,

crossing the lines, which is probably as good a definition of how social change happens as one can find.2

The Spanish Civil War began with a military coup.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

These two revolutions of faith and feminism, though very different, were built upon the same fundamental assumption: every person is intrinsically as valuable and worthy of love as any other.

The Bolsheviks are coming, like Atilla, like clouds of locusts. They are destroying everything in their path. (Vera Muromtseva)

the October Revolution of 1917 brought seismic changes to the city. In November, the 'agitators' arrived and with the support of local railway workers staged a Bolshevik coup d'état. This was swiftly followed by industrial and financial crisis as the city fell into debt and bankruptcy. Then followed arrests, shootings, confiscations and fear.

These arguments were, in his eyes, 'reactionary'; they subverted his insistence on relentless class war leading to the violent overthrow of the tsarist order.

I am fascinated by all the new technology that creates places for us to meet in what is called cyberspace. I understand what it must have meant for the rebellions in the 19th century, especially in 1830 and 1848, when the mass circulated newspaper became so important for the spreading of information.