Quotes About Revolution

Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")

I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.

Art can only progress towards its own self-annihilation.

Everybody was sorta going to sleep twards the end of 1983, and I felt that they had to be woken up!

LEFTISTS EAT THEIR CHILDREN: The poets, artists, and radicals are murdered first once the "revolution" actually comes about.

Most great products have been made over the dead bodies of experts.

Reform can be accomplished only when attitudes are changed.

We atheists can argue that, with the modern revolution in attitudes toward homosexuals, we have become the only group that may not reveal itself in normal social discourse.

In houses and in villages throughout the country, the smoke from indoor cooking contains carbon monoxide, black carbon, and other pollutants, creating pervasive and severe health problems. In response, the government launched a "blue flame revolution" to deliver cylinders of propane—derived from oil or natural gas—to eighty million rural households for cooking.

For many decades after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet Union had been closed off, an almost forbidden place, another world. The Soviet oil industry operated largely in isolation, with little of the flow of technology and equipment that was common in the rest of the world.

England did not become a democracy after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Far from it. Only a small fraction of the population had formal representation, but crucially, she was pluralistic. Once pluralism was enshrined, there was a tendency for the institutions to become more inclusive over time, even if this was a rocky and uncertain process. In

In Egypt, for instance, the first printing press was set up only in 1798, by Frenchmen who were part of the abortive attempt by Napoleon Bonaparte to capture the country.

We'll see that the reason that Britain is richer than Egypt is because in 1688, Britain (or England, to be exact) had a revolution that transformed the politics and thus the economics of the nation. People fought for and won more political rights, and they used them to expand their economic opportunities. The result was a fundamentally different political and economic trajectory, culminating in the Industrial Revolution.

Countries such as Great Britain and the United States became rich because their citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society where political rights were much more broadly distributed, where the government was accountable and responsive to citizens, and where the great mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities.

The leaders of the French Revolution and, subsequently, Napoleon exported the revolution to these lands, destroying absolutism, ending feudal land relations, abolishing guilds, and imposing equality before the law—the all-important notion of rule of law, which we will discuss in greater detail in the next chapter. The French Revolution thus prepared not only France but much of the rest of Europe for inclusive institutions and the economic growth that these would spur. As

On the eve of the French Revolution in 1789, there were severe restrictions placed on Jews throughout Europe. In the German city of Frankfurt, for example, their lives were regulated by orders set out in a statute dating from the Middle Ages. There

El propio Mao respondió así a las quejas por el alcance de aquella violencia: «Ese hombre, Hitler, era todavía más atroz. Cuanto más atroz, mejor, ¿no crees? Cuanta más gente matas, más revolucionario eres».

revolution that overthrew Mubarak will lead to a new set of institutions capable of bringing prosperity

Absolutism reigned not just in much of Europe but also in Asia, and similarly prevented industrialization during the critical juncture created by the Industrial Revolution. The Ming and Qing dynasties of China and the absolutism of the Ottoman Empire illustrate this pattern.

La Revolución francesa creó mucha violencia, sufrimiento, inestabilidad y guerra. No obstante, gracias a ella, los franceses no quedaron atrapados en instituciones extractivas que bloqueaban el crecimiento y la prosperidad económicos, como hicieron los regímenes absolutistas de Europa oriental como Austria-Hungría y Rusia.

In England there was a long history of absolutist rule that was deeply entrenched and required a revolution to remove it. In the United States and Australia, there was no such thing. The inclusive institutions established in the United States and Australia meant that the Industrial Revolution spread quickly to these lands and they began to get rich.

There should be no presumption that any critical juncture will lead to a successful political revolution or to change for the better. History is full of examples of revolutions and radical movements replacing one tyranny with another, in a pattern that the German sociologist Robert Michels dubbed the iron law of oligarchy, a particularly pernicious form of the vicious circle.

The man whose name I had not caught was saying: "Comes the revolution and we'll all be lined up against the wall—first thing." He seemed to think it was a good idea.

The fact is that all left-wing political dictatorships since the French Revolution have ended up being in some way totalitarian: that is, directing not just the politics of the nation under revolution but the social and cultural fabric of the entire society.