Quotes About Revolution

Better that anger should be directed into jihad abroad than into Iran-style revolution at home.

If these self-anointed leaders did not keep the people aroused with calls to preserve the Revolution, or to defend it from one imaginary foe after another, then the people might shake themselves awake from the trance they were in and begin to question the very men who had drenched their streets in blood and make France pariah among the civilized nations of the world.

There would be no Lenin without Rasputin.

Insurrections may be provoked or incited or may occur spontaneously as the expression of grievances or of frustrated aspirations or because of other factors: religious frenzy, blood feuds; mass hysteria induced by anything from a sports contest to a rape in Mississippi can lead to bloodshed and temporary anarchy. Guerrilla warfare does not necessarily follow. Insurrection is a phenomenon, revolution a process, which cannot begin until the historical stage has been set for it.

Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world." ? Vladimir Ilich Lenin

The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope." ? Karl Marx

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." ? Vladimir Ilich Lenin

Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost." ? Vladimir Ilich Lenin

Without new visions, we don't know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics, but a process that can and must transform us

breaking tradition always comes with a noise like mountains falling.

Innovation always trumps repeating what might have worked in the past

You can fit in. Or you can change the world. You don't get to do both.

The Industrial Revolution was the culmination of the rise of Western civilization that began in Greece twenty-seven centuries ago. It was the product of human freedom and the pursuit of knowledge, which is precisely why it happened where and when it did.

that there was no scientific revolution, only the culmination of normal scientific progress over several centuries and, moreover, that science arose only in Christian Europe because only medieval Europeans believed that science was possible and desirable.

Tanks could not solve what was essentially a political problem. If the revolution in Afghanistan could only be sustained with Soviet bayonets, that was a route down which the Soviet Union should not go.

Every subject has its canonical history, usually sold to beginners as a sequence of revolutionary vignettes, each associated with a 'pioneer'.

Left-wing politics has discarded the revolutionary paradigm advanced by the New Left, in favour of bureaucratic routines and the institutionalization of the welfare culture. The two goals of liberation and social justice remain in place: but they are promoted by legislation, committees and government commissions empowered to root out the sources of discrimination. Liberation and social justice have been bureaucratized.

The two goals of liberation and social justice are not obviously compatible, any more than were the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution. If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead, and what should we allow ourselves by way of constraining them?

The first axiom of Marx Scientist is that everything they tell you is a lie. The second axiom is that it doesn't matter, since you are lying too. The third axiom is 'Kill all liars!

If one looks back to the French Revolution, one sees just how easy it is for the doctrine of "human rights" to become an instrument of the most appalling tyranny. It suffices to do as the Jacobins did—to abolish the judiciary, and replace it by "people's courts." Then anything can be done to anyone, in the name of the Rights of Man.

If you ask yourself, why was it that communism finally collapsed, there wasn't any external force causing it to do so, it collapsed largely because the Poles woke up to their sense of national identity

Subsequent revolutions have in like manner regarded the Church as Public Enemy number 1, precisely because it creates a realm of value and authority outside the reach of the state. It

Whatever we think about the revolutions, the original slogan of the French Revolution – liberté, égalité, fraternité – was just a slogan, and nobody troubled to ask themselves whether liberté and égalité were compatible in practice. Really the subsequent history has been an illustration of that conflict between them.

Mais à nous, qui ne sommes ni des chevaliers de la foi ni des surhommes, il ne reste, si je puis dire, qu'à tricher avec la langue, qu'à tricher la langue. Cette tricherie salutaire, cette esquive, ce leurre magnifique, qui permet d'entendre la langue hors-pouvoir, dans la splendeur d'une révolution permanente du langage, je l'appelle pour ma part : littérature.