Revolutionary Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Mao Zedong

Adolf Hitler

George Marshall

John Updike

Rosa Luxemburg

Poul Anderson

Lionel Trilling

If today I stand here as a revolutionary, it is as a revolutionary against the Revolution.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on... It's perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science.

The pacifist's task today is to find a method of helping and healing which provides a revolutionary constructive substitute for war.

Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none. He is a madman, an immolator, wishful of burning, and slaughter, and sacrificing.

Peter Kropotkin

Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.

Lionel Trilling

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

Marxism is a revolutionary worldview that must always struggle for new revelations. Marxism must abhor nothing so much as the possibility that it becomes congealed in its current form. It is at its best when butting heads in self-criticism, and in historical thunder and lightning, it retains its strength.

Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.

In the final analysis, the whole cause of world revolution hinges on the revolutionary struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American people who make up the overwhelming majority of the world's population.

Clarke's Law of Revolutionary Ideas:

Every revolutionary idea — in science, politics, art, or whatever — seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases:
(1) "It's completely impossible — don't waste my time";
(2) "It's possible, but it's not worth doing";
(3) "I said it was a good idea all along."

Arthur C. Clarke

I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle.

Alexis de Tocqueville

If man does find the solution for world peace it will be the most revolutionary reversal of his record we have ever known.

George Marshall

Above all, try always to be able to feel deeply any injustice committed against any person in any part of the world. It is the most beautiful quality of a revolutionary.

In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.

Against my protests a mausoleum was built on the Red Square, a monument unbecoming and offensive to the revolutionary consciousness.

Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. It's very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. … Apple's been very fortunate in that it's introduced a few of these.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic.

You should fight to be among the best in school. The very best in every sense and you already know what that means; study and revolutionary attitude. In other words: good conduct, seriousness, love for the revolution, comradeship. I was not that way at your age but I lived in a different society, where man was an enemy of man. Now you have the privilege of living in another era and you must be worthy of it.

We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination, as the immediate task of the coming revolutionary action.

There is no example in history of a revolutionary movement involving such gigantic masses being so bloodless.

The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.