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Quotes About Uprisings

Like festivals, uprisings cannot happen every day- otherwise they would not be "nonordinary." But such moments of intensity give shape and meaning to the entirety of a life. The shaman returns you can't stay up on the roof forever - but things have changed, shifts and integrations have occurred -a difference is made.
~ Peter Lamborn Wilson
Some of the greatest uprisings and consequent civil wars in Mexico have centered squarely on the ownership of land.
~ Wole Soyinka
Mushroomed: after a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms mycologists call the fruiting body of a larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but less visible long-term organizing—or underground work—often laid the foundation.
~ Rebecca Solnit
Walking the streets can be a form of social engagement, even of political action when we walk in concert, as we do in uprisings, demonstrations, and revolutions, but it can also be a means of inducing reverie, subjectivity, and imagination
~ Rebecca Solnit
Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.
~ William James
In the spring of 1844, a good many white people in Manchester County remained uneasy about news from other places about slave "restlessness" that had gone on a few years before. In the North, people called it slave uprisings, but in much of Virginia the word uprisings had an abolitionist undertone and was felt to be too strong for what many slaveowners preferred to characterize as "a family squabble," instigated by unknowns not part of the family.
~ Edward P. Jones
At various times during the 1950's and 1960's attempts were made by leaders in Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria to unite as a single Arab nation, but due to the famous independent streak ingrained in the Arab personality, nothing came of those efforts. In fact, the Middle East has suffered from numerous uprisings, wars, and violent revolutions since the end of World War I right up to the present day.
~ Alistair MacLean
But Margot romanticized uprisings of people in distant lands. She didn't judge brown rapists and torturers by the same standards she would have applied to white men who drowned children for being the wrong religion. She believed, I think, like Suhrawardy, that 'bloodshed and disorder are not necessarily evil in themselves, if resorted to for a noble cause.
~ Robert Galbraith
The cause of these uprisings was the desire to rule, rooted in acquisitiveness and the love of honor, but after a time the violence seemed to take on a life of its own.
~ Leo Strauss
Perhaps the true legacy of his boyhood was an equivocal one: he came to detest the tyranny embodied by the planters and their authoritarian rule, while also fearing the potential uprisings of the disaffected slaves. The twin specters of despotism and anarchy were to haunt him for the rest of his life.
~ Ron Chernow
Before the American Revolution there were frequent slave uprisings, and a lot of people would run away.
~ Edward Ball
The French Revolution was a revolt of the mob. It was the primogenitor of the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler's Nazi Party, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's slaughter, and America's periodic mob uprisings, from Shays' Rebellion to today's dirty waifs smashing Starbucks windows whenever bankers come to town. The French Revolution is the godless antithesis to the founding of America. And
~ Ann Coulter
The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don't always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!
~ Chinua Achebe
Beside the end rack there was a storage cabinet which Oleg swung open to reveal awkward stacks of audio tapes, each one carefully labelled. "I am all-seeing eye," he announced proudly. "What kind of stuff are you pulling these days?" "What you like? I got marital arguments, I got guerrilla uprisings, I got anarchist lovetalk, I got every auditory sexual deviance you couldn't imagine. I got serious . . . fucking . . . shit.
~ Simon Logan
I wrote two poems about the '81 uprisings: 'Di Great Insohreckshan' and 'Mekin Histri.' I wrote those two poems from the perspective of those who had taken part in the Brixton riots. The tone of the poem is celebratory because I wanted to capture the mood of exhilaration felt by black people at the time.
~ Linton Kwesi Johnson
U regijama koje su držali boljševici bila je to klasna borba protiv onih ispred, buržoazije, društveno stranih elemenata, lov na militante svih neboljševi?kih partija, represija nad radni?kim štrajkovima, pobune nesigurnih jedinica Crvene armije, selja?ki ustanci. U zonama koje su držali Bijeli, lov na osumnji?ene elemente mogu?ih simpatizera židovskih boljševika.
~ Stéphane Courtois
Durante tres años, la política de requisas iba a provocar miles de sublevaciones y de motines, que degeneraron en verdaderas guerras campesinas reprimidas con la mayor violencia.
~ Stéphane Courtois
There were, however, countervailing forces. The independence of the Italian judiciary had been reinforced by the recruitment of a generation of idealistic lawyers in the wake of the global uprisings of 1968.
~ Francis Fukuyama
In practice, organizational change tends to be either trivial or traumatic. Every day, companies refresh products and improve processes with little drama. Strategic pivots, by contrast, tend to be convulsive, not unlike the uprisings that occasionally concuss poorly governed dictatorships.
~ Gary Hamel
I don't think we're basically a revolutionary country. We have too large a middle class. The middle class tends to be apathetic. An apathetic middle class gives stability to a system. They never get carried away strongly, one way or the other. Maybe we'll have riots, maybe we'll have shootings. Maybe we'll have uprisings as the farmers did in Iowa. But you won't have revolution.
~ Studs Terkel
If a huge number of people call for change, the government will have to react. If you want to avoid uprisings, or demonstrations, you need to respond to the peoples desperate need for change.
~ Mohamed ElBaradei
The possession of unnecessary implements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues and tends to foment uprisings.
~ Toyotomi Hideyoshi
It is true that from time to time Jews suffered from the fury of an exploited peasantry or their competitors. But from time to time the aristocracy suffered the same fate. Thousands of French aristocrats were slaughtered during peasant uprisings or at the Great Terror of 1793. Many Russian aristocrats were killed or expelled during the October Revolution of 1917. Many of them were innocent, for class warfare can be as cruel as any war.
~ Israel Shamir
But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, then state violence can spawn reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls "terrorism." Violent uprisings are always tragic, and violent revolutions always empower revolutionaries, such as Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who are as ruthless as their adversaries. Violence inevitably becomes the principal form of coercion on both sides of the divide.
~ Chris Hedges