Revolution Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

All the talk about the so-called unspeakable horror of early capitalism can be refuted by a single statistic: precisely in these years in which British capitalism developed, precisely in the age called the Industrial Revolution in England, in the years from 1760 to 1830, precisely in those years the population of England doubled.

Ludwig von Mises

Like all self-respecting revolutionaries, Mussolini considered himself a Marxist. He regarded Marx as the 'greatest theoretician of socialism' and Marxism as the 'scientific doctrine of class revolution.'

The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get laid.

I entered the [Iran-Iraq] war on a fifteen-day mission, and ended up staying until the end. … We were all young and wanted to serve the revolution.

Qasem Soleimani

The best advice possible on any legal matter is (1) maintain your cool and temper, (2) keep your mouth shut, (3) get a good lawyer and call your family, and (4) never forget what you have been through. Allow the fear and loneliness, and hatred to build inside you, rather than diminish with time. Allow your passions to fertilize the seeds of constructive revolution. Allow your love of freedom to overcome the false values placed on human life. For the only method to communicate with the enemy is to speak on his own level, using his own terms. Freedom is based on respect, and respect is earned by the spilling of blood.

Public policy changes in very large leaps, as in the New Deal of the 1930's, the Great Society of the mid-1960's, and the Reagan revolution of 1981. These spasms of reform are interspersed with periods of rest and stasis, as if the participants are exhausted from their exertion and catching their breath. But in any event, this does not look like Darwinian, gradualistic evolution.

John W. Kingdon

The Messianic era is the present age, which began to germinate with the teachings of Spinoza, and finally came into historical existence with the great French Revolution.

From 1789, perhaps even before that, it had been the willingness of politicians to exploit either the threat or the fact of violence that had given them the power to challenge constituted authority. Bloodshed was not the unfortunate by product of revolution, it was the source of energy.

The search…for ways and means to make the machine—and the vast bureaucracy of the corporation state and of government that runs that machine—the servant of man. That is the revolution that is coming.

William O. Douglas

My painting, at the limit, can only signify itself... It is. So much so, and so well, that anyone can make it and claim it... Perhaps the only thing that one can do after having seen a canvas like ours is total revolution.

We atheists can... argue that, with the modern revolution in attitudes toward homosexuals, we have become the only group that may not reveal itself in normal social discourse.

Philip Warren Anderson

We're all so clogged with dead ideas
passed from generation to generation
that even the best of us don't know the way out
We invented the Revolution
but we don't know how to run it
Look everyone wants to keep something from the past
a souvenir of the old regime
This man decides to keep a painting
This one keeps his mistress
He [pointing] keeps his garden
He [pointing] keeps his estate
He keeps his country house
He keeps his factories
This man couldn't part with his shipyards
This one kept his army
and that one keeps his king

We must realize that today's Establishment is the New George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution.

William O. Douglas

Our Founders fought a revolution and wrote a Constitution so America would never be a nation where one person had all the power. Two hundred and forty years later, we still put our faith in each other.

Hillary Clinton

The evolution of art has nothing to do with the revolution of society.

We are moving towards another type of society than that to which we have become accustomed. This is sometimes referred to as a new service society, the society of the second industrial revolution or the post-industrial society. There is no guarantee of our safe arrival. Not only are the interdependencies greater – they are differently structured... The changes in the policy field [housing, health care, urban rehabilitation, education, etc.] demand a new mobilization of the sciences.

Social Democracy preached against capitalism for half a century. After the November revolution the Reds had the opportunity to direct capitalism into the proper paths: but nothing happened!

Julius Streicher

Every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.

The foremost challenge is that of the knowledge revolution. Economic power will depend on creativity and innovation. Creation of wealth will move from traditional resources to the one asset: knowledge.

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

The big problem is that people don't believe a revolution is possible, and it is not possible precisely because they do not believe it is possible.

Theodore Kaczynski

Camera-Phones are at the root of the Citizen-Journalism revolution.

We are strong and powerful now, able to drive into the ocean any power on earth that should step, with ostile foot, upon the fsoil of the republic. But it was not always so. In our days of weakness, the men of this wronged race gave their blood freely for the defense and liberties of the country. The first victim of the Boston Massacre, on the 5th of March 1770, which made the fires of resistance burn more intensely, was a colored man. Hundreds of colored men entered the ranks and fought bravely on all the fields of the Revolution.

It was our hope that Libya with its revolution would become a model of freedom, popular democracy and a state free from oppression and injustice. However Libya became another conventional state, even a dictatorial or police state. This is deeply regrettable. We are not like that, nor do we want to be like that.

Muammar Gaddafi

Following the sexual revolution of the Sixties, dating has become a form of Russian roulette. Some girls have traditional religious values and mean to remain virgins until marriage. Others are leery of AIDS, unsure of what they want, but can be convinced. For others, anything goes: they'll jump into bed on the first date. What's a guy to do?

We live in an age of artificial scarcity, maintained by ignorance and fear. The government has been paying farmers not to grow food for fifty years—while millions starve. Labor unions, business and government conspire to hold back the Microprocessor Revolution—because none of them know how to deal with the massive unemployment it will cause. (Fuller's books could tell them.) The utilities advertise continually that "solar power is at least forty years in the future" when my friend Karl Hess, and hundreds of others, already live in largely solar-powered houses. These propaganda advertisements are just a delaying action, because the utilities still haven't figured out how to put a meter between us and the sun.

Robert Anton Wilson