Revolution Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

There is a desire for progress in the hearts of all men, and it is the sense of frustration and inability to move forward that brings violent revolution.

Eleanor Roosevelt

We don't want to be like the leader in the French Revolution who said There go my people, I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.

John F. Kennedy

The Bolsheviks will do everything to secure this peaceful development of the revolution.

Our business is to help get everything possible done to make sure the "last" chance for a peaceful development of the revolution, to help by the presentation of our programme, by making clear its national character, its absolute accord with the interests and demands of a vast majority of the population.

It is therefore not true that the mere existence of the Soviet Union is capable of assuring the victory of the revolution in other countries.

The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.

John F. Kennedy

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.

G. K. Chesterton

I think there can be a collective leadership. Maybe some symbolize the struggle [for human's rights] a little more than others, but I think it's absolutely necessary for the leadership to be united in order to make the revolution effective.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

G. K. Chesterton

In spite of the existence of the Soviet Union, however, the proletarian revolution during the past years has not recorded a victory in any other country.

Concord River is remarkable for the gentleness of its current, which is scarcely perceptible, and some have referred to its influence the proverbial moderation of the inhabitants of Concord, as exhibited in the Revolution, and on later occasions.

Henry David Thoreau

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

It is also false that the revolution ripens and comes to development only in the national soil.

Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.

The July Revolution took place; with one bound I became a revolutionist, and acquired the conviction that every decently active being ought to occupy himself with politics exclusively. I was only happy in the company of political writers, and I commenced an Overture upon a political theme. Thus was I minded, when I left school and went to the university: not, indeed, to devote myself to studying for any profession — for my musical career was now resolved on — but to attend lectures on philosophy and aesthetics. By this opportunity of improving my mind I profited as good as nothing, but gave myself up to all the excesses of student life; and that with such reckless levity, that they very soon revolted me.

It is equally obvious and it became clear... that no ruler can legislate a social revolution. He can implement the outward form of social change, but he cannot legislate change in the minds of the people. Stable and lasting change has to evolve slowly and gradually over a period of many generations. What signaled the beginning of the end... was the radical modernization program, which virtually affected every aspect of Iranian life... [including] the sweeping emancipation of women, which moved as it were 13 centuries in the course of three decades.

If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution.

Dare! — this word contains all the politics of our revolution.

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

Hitler and others promised that as soon as the National Socialist revolution had removed Jewry, economic exploitation would be overcome and a socially just utopia would be nigh.

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.

Buddhism … is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or loyal opposition to the culture in which it is involved.

I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness.

Stephen Jay Gould

Unless revolution uproots the basic social organization, the biological family — the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled — the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated.

Shulamith Firestone