Revolutionary Quotes

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The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie has, historically, played a most revolutionary role.

Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution. It progresses from appearances to acts, from the dandy to the revolutionary.

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

The revolution has its own laws: in the period of its culmination it pushes the most highly developed, determined and far-seeing stratum of the revolutionary class to the most advanced positions.

I am convinced that floods of personal disaster can never drown a determined revolutionary nor can the cumulus of misery that accompanies tragedy suffocate him.

For the greatest revolutionary changes on this earth would not have been thinkable if their motive force, instead of fanatical, yes, hysterical passion, had been merely the bourgeois virtues of law and order.

At certain times in the revolutionary struggle, the difficulties outweigh the favorable conditions and so constitute the principal aspect of the contradiction and the favorable conditions constitute the secondary aspect. But through their efforts the revolutionaries can overcome the difficulties step by step and open up a favorable new situation, thus a difficult situation yields place to a favorable one.

In 1925 - 27 the revolution in China was destroyed by the false revolutionary strategy of the Stalinist faction. To this last question I consecrate my book, Problems of the Chinese Revolution (issued by the Pioneer Publishers, New York 1932).

Once again, he who ignores the problems of revolutionary strategy would do better not to talk about revolutions at all.

That the existence of the Soviet Union has an international revolutionary significance is a commonplace equally recognized by friends and foes.

It is impossible for a genuine people's revolution in any country to win victory without various forms of help from the international revolutionary forces.

The boycott of parliamentary institutions on the part of anarchists and semianarchists is dictated by a desire not to submit their weakness to a test on the part of the masses, thus preserving their right to an inactive hauteur which makes no difference to anybody. A revolutionary party can turn its back to a parliament only if it has set itself the immediate task of overthrowing the existing regime.

"The revolution's decisive victory over tsarism" means the establishment of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.

Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides States and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.

Henry David Thoreau

The last word remains with Christ and Handel; and this must stand as the best defence of Tolerance until a better man than I makes a better job of it.
Put shortly and undramatically the case is that a civilization cannot progress without criticism, and must therefore, to save itself from stagnation and putrefaction, declare impunity for criticism. This means impunity not only for propositions which, however novel, seem interesting, statesmanlike, and respectable, but for propositions that shock the uncritical as obscene, seditious, blasphemous, heretical, and revolutionary.

George Bernard Shaw

The Cuban Revolution takes up Marx at the point where he himself left science to shoulder his revolutionary rifle. And it takes him up at that point, not in a revisionist spirit, of struggling against that which follows Marx, of reviving "pure" Marx, but simply because up to that point Marx, the scientist, placed himself outside of the history he studied and predicted. From then on Marx, the revolutionary, could fight within history.

This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.

We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.

The revolutionary war is a war of the masses; it can be waged only by mobilizing the masses and relying on them.

All counter-revolutionary wars are unjust, all revolutionary wars are just.

The educated man tries to repress the inferior one in himself, without realizing that by this he forces the latter to become revolutionary.

If we Communists show no interest in industry and the economy and are not good at any other useful work, if we know nothing about these things and are capable of nothing, except 'revolutionary work' in the abstract, this kind of revolutionary is of no use at all. We must oppose this kind of good-for-nothing revolutionary and learn all kinds of technical knowledge that will help China's industrialization.

Only the defeat of the proletariat in Germany in 1923 gave the decisive push to the creation of Stalin's theory of national socialism: the downward curve of the revolution gave rise to Stalinism, not to the theory of the permanent revolution, which was first formulated by me in 1905. This theory is not bound to a definite calendar of revolutionary events; it only reveals the world-wide interdependence of the revolutionary process.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch-antirevolutionaries.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reading is learning, but applying is also learning and the more important kind of learning at that. Our chief method is to learn warfare through warfare. A person who has had no opportunity to go to school can also learn warfare - he can learn through fighting in war. A revolutionary war is a mass undertaking; it is often not a matter of first learning and then doing, but of doing and then learning, for doing is itself learning.