Quotes About Revolution

Vicious fights among socialist and leftist factions are a recognized feature of the history of socialism.

When Mussolini "sold out" he became an outcast. He had neither money nor power. Nor did any of the first fascists embrace fascism for this reason. Rather, they became fascists because they saw fascism as the only way to rescue socialism and make it viable. In other words, their defection was within socialism—they sought to create a new type of socialism that would actually draw a mass following and produce the workers' revolution that Marx anticipated and hoped for.

I feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire on Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday.1 —Saul Alinsky

The first fascists," Anthony James Gregor tells us, "were almost all Marxists.

THE ORIGINAL CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION Let's begin by examining the first civil rights revolution in America—the civil rights revolution of the 1860s. This was a Republican revolution, which is why progressive Democrats ignore it and pretend that the later revolution of the 1950s and 1960s is the only one. Yet of the two civil rights revolutions, the first—the ignored one—is actually more important.

It has been said that once the mind has been expanded by an idea or concept, it can never return to its original way of thinking.

Freud is finished, Einstein's next.

It is the violent act that makes history and changes everything that came before.

To have true socialism, he said, we first establish capitalism, totally and heartlessly, and then destroy it by degrees, bury it in the sea.

The dangerous secrets used to be held outside the government. Plots, conspiracies, secrets of revolution, secrets of the end of the social order. Now it's the government that has a lock on the secrets that matter. All the danger is in the White House, from nuclear weapons on down.

This is the last avant-garde. Bold new forms. The power to shock.

Zero to One.

Every cultural industry is up for disruption, and the promise is that creators get fully compensated for the value they create.

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation... All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.

People love movies about characters who transform, and they love businesses that help them experience transformation themselves.

The king and queen wanted to be done with him, although Louis seemed pleased to see him soon after the motley invasion. But the queen's blue eyes remained cold. "It would be better to perish," she quipped, "than to be saved by M. de Lafayette.

A real blow to OGPU came from Bukharin in autumn 1924:

And spiteful in his failure, he immediately started a revolution for all, so that nobody escaped punishment. And our fathers followed him to Golgothas with banners and songs. . . . In Russia you mustn't wake anybody. Naum Korzhavin I have tried, rather than write a new biography of Stalin or another his-tory of the USSR, to examine Stalin's path to total power and the means—and the men—which enabled him to hold on to it.

The Bolsheviks attacked the Russian state not because it was oppressive but because it was weak.

Rules are meant to be broken.

It's the outsiders who change the world.

Young people longed to change the world, regardless of the cost to themselves or others.

Boy did he hate banks. He told me once that the Founding Fathers worried more about banks than they worried about the British. They knew that banks had been causing chaos, bringing empires to their knees, for centuries, all in the name of free enterprise. Photographer

Revolutions can occur only when significant portions of the elites, and especially the military, defect or stand aside. Indeed, in most revolutions it is the elites who mobilize the population to help them overthrow the regime.