Revolutionary Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Trusting children and books is a revolutionary act. Books are, after all, dangerous stuff. Leave a child alone with a book and you don't know what might happen.

In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist.

Capitalism had been more revolutionary then any previous social system. It had swept away without scruples old institutions and modes of thought, if they were found to stand in its way.

Eric Roll, Baron Roll of Ipsden

At the beginning I was confronted with a choice: move into art or revolutionary politics,... I took the path of art at the age of 18.... I could see this possibility of using the ideas of social change within art.

With regard to life, modern painting is a revolutionary activity…We need it in order to transform the world into a more humane place where mankind can live in liberty…We must accept these things with passion. It means that we must live imaginatively.

But all those same resolutions said that, in the Declaration of the Union, the internal police of each colony should be recognized as binding. In other words, the origins of American dual federalism are to be found in the resolutions of the revolutionary assemblies authorizing the Continental Congress to declare independence. They declared independence and union together, and there was never any time in which any state acted on the international sphere, having diplomatic relations—and the Constitution itself forbids each state to have any diplomatic action. They could not act independently of the other states in the international arena.

It is well known that the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.

The reformist project put in place by the U. P. enclosed itself within the bourgeois order…it aimed to forge an alliance with sectors of the bourgeoisie, it didn't lean on the revolutionary organizations of the working class, in its own organs of popular power, it rejected an alliance with rank and file soldiers and sub officers in the armed forces, it sought to seal an alliance with the bourgeois faction. The reformist illusions allowed the ruling classes to prevail in the superstructure of the state from where it launched its reactionary counter offensive, by, firstly, leaning on industrialist federations, on the petty-bourgeoisie and finally on high-ranking officials of the Chilean Armed Forces…

Miguel Enríquez

The people generally get accustomed to the established order of things and begin to tremble at the very idea of a change. It is this lethargical spirit that needs be replaced by the revolutionary spirit.

DiLorenzo is absolutely wrong in saying that the 13 states were recognized as independent separate sovereignties. They were not. In 1826, Madison and Jefferson together, in making rules for the University of Virginia, resolved that the first of the documents that should be studied by the law faculty of the University of Virginia, was the Declaration of Independence as the Act of Union of the States. The Declaration was a declaration of separation from Great Britain and union with each other. And the state legislatures, or state revolutionary colonial legislatures on the road to independence—almost all of them passed resolutions calling for independence and for union.

Given the way universities work to reinforce and perpetuate the status quo, the way knowledge is offered as commodity, Women's Studies can easily become the place where revolutionary feminist thought and feminist activism are submerged or made secondary to the goals of academic careerism

This is the problem for which revolutionary theory has yet to find the right solution, if there is one. The difficulty is that the economic interests of the two classes are antagonistic.

To the revolutionary mind the American vista must have been almost as incredible as Genghis Khan's first view of China - so rich, so soft, so unaware.

The political horizon would be greatly clarified if the voters were offered the choice of three parties representing three strategies: A conservative party committed to the preservation of individualism, perhaps in a highly modified form; a communist party bent upon revolutionary changes through violent seizure of power, confiscation, and a proletarian dictatorship; and a radical party seeking to socialize the basic industries and to move toward an equalization of economic privilege through purchase, taxation, and drastic regulation, without resorting to confiscation or armed seizure of power.

Science does not grow successively and regularly. It goes by bounds and revolutions. It is the changes in theories that mark the bounds. Science is revolutionary.

Revolutionary in my ideas, liberal in my objectives and conservative in my methods.

Leaks have happened before. They are not new. But the industrial scale of leaking made possible through the digitisation of information and the ability to communicate instantly across the globe - that is new. If it is to be revolutionary, however, we need a model for a new type of politics.

Citizens, by what illusion could one persuade himself that you are inhuman. Your Revolutionary Tribunal has condemned three hundred rascals to death in a year. Has not the Spanish Inquisition done worse than that... Have the English assizes butchered no one in that period?... What of the kings of Europe, does anyone prate to them of pity? Ah, do not allow yourselves to grow soft-hearted!

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

A revolutionary in every bedroom cannot fail to shake up the status quo. And if it is your wife that is revolting, you can't just split to the suburbs. Feminism, when it truly achieves it's goals, will crack through the most basic structures of our society.

Shulamith Firestone

Only a loyal, determined struggle to destroy cultural aggression and bring out the truth, whatever it may be, is revolutionary and consonant with real progress; it is the only approach which opens on to the universal. Humanitarian declarations are not called for and add nothing to real progress.

Cheikh Anta Diop

What I propose for the "life of a poet" goes against the grain of the fossil fuel monoculture. Maybe the most revolutionary act these days is not to watch television and to read a book a day at least..

Like the adolescent, the artist is a dreamer and a revolutionary; like the adolescent, he often finds his accomplishment inadequate to his imaginings. But his dream, setting him apart, helps him to escape the burden of the real.

Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks

All orthodox opinion - that is, today, "revolutionary" opinion either of the pure or the impure variety - is anti-man.

Literally as well as metaphorically, the man accustomed to inverting lenses has undergone a revolutionary transformation of vision.

But I think the bomb instead constitutes merely a first step in a new control by man over the forces of nature too revolutionary and dangerous to fit into old concepts.

Henry L. Stimson