Revolutionary Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I intrepret the revolutionary process as dialogical cultural action which is prolonged in 'cultural revolution' once power is taken. In both stages a serious and profound effort at conscientização—by means of which the people, through a true praxis, leave behind the status of objects to assume the status of historical Subjects—is necessary.

There are two kinds of thinkers, scholars and scientists. The first are the 'trail blazers' who propose new revolutionary ideas, point to new directions for scientific and intellectual developments, create new paradigms of science and scholarship, but leave the details to others. The second are those who follow the new trail, carry out careful experimentation and research within the established paradigm, and work out the precise formulations of theories in a particular domain of knowledge.

Thaddus E. Weckowicz

Of the twelve million hectares that the farmers have, we said we needed about half of that for a start. Even then you will say, of course, "Take all of it!" (laughs) Even deep down as we stand by our revolutionary principles, we still recognize that there should be some little measure of charity. No? Well, I will take your message back home.

The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.

In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the... West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens.

Jesus was a revolutionary, who did not become an extremist, since he did not offer an ideology, but Himself. He was also a mystic, who did not use his intimate relationship with God to avoid the social evils of his time, but shocked his milieu to the point of being executed as a rebel. In this sense he also remains for nuclear man the way to liberation and freedom.

His partitioning of the octave in the first ten bars places Varèse with Scriabin and the Schoenberg circle among the revolutionary composers whose work initiates the beginning of a new mainstream tradition in the music of our century.

This extremely shocking and utterly revolutionary call is the essence of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus: we are not called to simply believe certain points or observe certain practices, but ultimately to cling to the person of Christ as life itself.

David Platt (pastor)

Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.

In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the State takes it over?

I want to say something about Picasso as a revolutionary. A revolution in the history of art is a reflection of the history of society. Art cannot revolutionize society. It is a reflection of that revolution.. You [Joseph Beuys] talking in the same interview] have revolutionized art. But I do not see that you have revolutionized society directly. You have depicted what has not yet existed.... art and life are not two separate realms, but they have shifted out of phase with each other.

Anyway, in America the word revolutionary is used to sell pantyhose.

What security have you for your own safety if every man of vile temper, of low instincts, of base purpose, can find in his own heart a higher law than that which is the rule of society, the Constitution, and the Bible? These higher-law preachers should be tarred and feathered, and whipped by those they have thus instigated. This, my friends, is what was called in good old revolutionary times, Lynch Law. It is sometimes the very best law, because it deals summary justice upon those who would otherwise escape from all other kinds of punishment.

Jefferson Davis

WE BELIEVE that RAHOWA (RAcial HOly WAr), under the victorious flag of the one and only, true and revolutionary White Racial Religion — Creativity —, is the only road to the resurrection and redemption of the White Race.

Your body is just one in a mass of cuddly humanity. Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them. The duty of a revolutionary is to make love and that means staying alive and free. That doesn't allow for cop-outs. Smoking dope and hanging up Che's picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps. A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power.

It's Tolstoy, by the way, I say as I open the door. He turns around. What? Shut up, I tell myself. Shut up. The writer of Anna Karenina. Not Trotsky. Trotsky was a revolutionary who was stabbed with a pickax in Mexico in 1940. But I can understand how the T thing could confuse you.

Melina Marchetta

Ascetic Christianity called the world evil and left it. Humanity is waiting for a revolutionary Christianity which will call the world evil and change it.

Walter Rauschenbusch

To those who have no personal experience of this revolutionary aspect of Christian truth, but who see only the outer crust of dead, human conservatism that tends to form around the Church the way barnacles gather on the hull of a ship, all this talk about dynamism sounds foolish.

In a revolutionary movement there is always the danger that political exigencies might obscure, or even nullify, essential spiritual aims. A firm insistence on the inviolability and primacy of such aims is not mere idealism but a necessary safeguard against an Animal Farm syndrome where the new order after its first flush of enthusiastic reforms takes on the murky colours of the very system it has replaced.

Aung San Suu Kyi

And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization a simply a question of relative strength.

The psychopath... is a rebel, a religious disobeyer of prevailing codes and standards. Moreover, clinical experience with such individuals makes it appear that the psychopath is a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program.

Robert M. Lindner

A revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell.

I returned to school [after the bus accident], but I felt very sore and had little strength. I took my paintings to Diego [Rivera], and he liked them a lot, most of all the self-portrait. But of the rest he told me that I was influenced by Doctor Atl [a Mexican painter and revolutionary] and by Montenegro, and that I should try to paint whatever I wanted without being influenced by anyone else. That impressed me a lot, and I began to paint that I believed in. Then the friendship and almost courtship with Diego began. I would go to see him paint in the afternoon, and afterwards he would take me home by bus or in a Fordcito – a little Ford that he had – and he would kiss me.

I think art is the only political power, the only revolutionary power, the only evolutionary power, the only power to free humankind form all repression. I say not that art has already realized this, on the contrary, and because it has not, it has to be developed as a weapon, at first there are radical levels, then you can speak about special details.

It's wildly irritating to have invented something as revolutionary as sarcasm, only to have it abused by amateurs.

Christopher Moore