Quotes About Revolution

It was the indispensable institution, led by the indispensable man, and the coupling of a national army with its commander marked the transformation of a rebellion into a revolution. "Confusion and discord reigned in every department," Washington wrote in late July. "However we mend every day, and I flatter myself that in a little time we shall work up these raw materials into good stuff.

Edward Rutledge, a prominent South Carolina politician, wrote in December that arming freed slaves tended "more effectually to work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.

London—the king's men, if not the king himself—conspired to deprive them of what they and their ancestors had wrenched from this hard land. They were, a Boston writer concluded, "panting for an explosion.

Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.

The world is brimming with plaster replicas, and the point is to smash them to bits, to create an upheaval so acute it cannot be anticipated or resisted.

I love the modern technology now.

We didn't come for the revolution. We came for breakfast.

Marx never had a steady income or a permanent job or a bank account… But what he couldn't earn for his own family, he won for Millions of others through his writings…

Progress does not come from following the norms, but instead by breaking them. What is normal remains the same and therefore we must depart from the past.

The biggest revolutions are the ones that happen in-between our ears.

One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.

There are no longer moderates. There's no longer a center. There's either authoritarian populism (Trump) or democratic populism (represented in 2016 by Bernie's "political revolution").

No man, by the mere force of his own genius, could effect revolutions of this description in society, if society did not place the divining rod in his hands, and voluntarily prostrate itself before the sorcery by which it is first dazzled and then duped.

For centuries, man believed that the sun revolves around the earth. Centuries later, he still thinks that time moves clockwise.

Women wear the breeches… in a word, the world turned upside downward.

On February 15, 1921, the Red Army invaded Georgia.

how did he come to be elevated to membership of the Bolshevik Central Committee?

Such was classical Marxism's prospectus for the post-revolutionary future. Leninist Marxism's innovation was to interpose—for a backward country like Russia—a whole historical epoch between the proletarian revolution and the advent of socialism.

Trotsky, in whose writings we find very many valuable observations on Stalin as an individual, took the position that he was important not in his own right but only as a personification of the Thermidorean bureaucracy. As he summed up his view in The Revolution Betrayed, "Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.

The internal developmental process was always connected in Lenin's mind with external events, in particular with the prospects of assistance resulting from worker revolutions in other countries. "The complete victory of socialist revolution is unthinkable in one country," he said on November 8, 1918.

party crisis that prevailed from 1907 to 1912. That period of reaction saw a catastrophic decline in party fortunes. Discouragement, apathy, and political quietism took over in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution. The party practically fell apart as former activists deserted it en masse and arrests took a heavy toll of those still willing to carry on. By the summer of 1909, not more than five or six of the Bolshevik underground committees were still functioning regularly in Russia.

Consequently, Lenin and his followers went down in history as the Bolsheviki (majorityites); their opponents, as the Mensheviki (minorityites).

What the "one country" idea meant to Stalin, as became quite clear from his many speeches of the middle twenties, was that Russia, which had shown the world the way to proletarian revolution, would now be able, with or without help from outside, at the cost of great exertions, to accomplish the second historic feat of constructing a full socialist society.

Not he but Trotsky had risen to the heights of glory as Lenin's right-hand man in the Revolution and the Civil War.