Popular quotes about Revolution! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
As to the history of the revolution, my ideas may be peculiar, perhaps singular. What do we mean by the revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.
John AdamsRevolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There is no final revolution, no final number. The social revolution is only one of an infinite number of numbers: the law of revolution is not a social law, but an immeasurably greater one. It is a cosmic, universal law - like the laws of the conservation of energy and of the dissipation of energy (entropy).
Yevgeny ZamyatinThe young intellectuals are all chanting, "Revolution, Revolution," but I say the revolution will have to start in our homes, by achieving equal rights for women.
Qiu JinBiomimicry is innovation inspired by nature. In a society accustomed to dominating or 'improving' nature, this respectful imitation is a radically new approach, a revolution really. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Biomimicry Revolution introduces an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from her.
Janine BenyusThere are those, on the one hand, who hope to achieve the social revolution through the State by preserving and even extending most of its powers to be used for the revolution. And there are those like ourselves who see the State, both in its present form, in its very essence, and in whatever guise it might appear, an obstacle to the social revolution, the greatest hindrance to the birth of a society based on equality and liberty, as well as the historic means designed to prevent this blossoming.
Peter KropotkinThe day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution -- not a social or a political revolution -- only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.
Simone de BeauvoirThe sustainability revolution will, hopefully, be the third major social and economic turning point in human history, following the Neolithic Revolution - moving from hunter-gathering to farming - and the Industrial Revolution
Prince CharlesYou cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
Ursula K. Le GuinThe Bolshevik revolution was a counter-revolution. Its first moves were to destroy and eliminate every socialist tendency that had developed in the pre-revolutionary period. Their goal was as they said; it wasn't a big secret. They regarded the Soviet Union as sort a backwater. They were orthodox Marxists, expecting a revolution in Germany. They moved toward what they themselves called "state capitalism," then they moved on to Stalinism. They called it democracy and called it socialism. The one claim was as ludicrous as the other.
Noam ChomskyPeople involved in a revolution don't become part of the system; they destroy the system... The Negro revolution is no revolution because it condemns the system and then asks the system it has condemned to accept them.
Malcolm XThe revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart or spirit...it is a revolution of character which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another. It is one that changes their ideas, beliefs, feelings, and habits of choice, as well as their bodily tendencies and social relations. It penetrates to the deepest layer of their soul. External, social arrangements may be used to this end, but they are not the end, nor are they a fundamental part of the means
Dallas WillardPeople were touchingly naive at the dawn of the Internet revolution when they said the Internet will route around censorship the way it routes around damage. With any revolution, the establishment catches up and figures out how to screw it up. The answer is to keep technology advancing fast enough so that those who would try to control it can't. It's up to people to defend what they care about. We shouldn't be complacent that this stuff is going to be a force for good.
Paul SaffoThe consequences of things are not always proportionate to the apparent magnitude of those events that have produced them. Thus the American Revolution, from which little was expected, produced much; but the French Revolution, from which much was expected, produced little.
Charles Caleb ColtonChairman Mao creatively applied Marxism-Leninism to every aspect of the Chinese revolution, and he had creative views on philosophy, political science, military science, literature and art, and so on. Unfortunately, in the evening of his life, particularly during the "Cultural Revolution", he made mistakes - and they were not minor ones - which brought many misfortunes upon our Party, our state and our people.
Deng XiaopingAn ant can't make a revolution, but a monkey can do; because it owns a fist! No real revolution is ever possible without fist.
Mehmet Murat IldanWe have this revolution that's happening in our lifetime. The Information Revolution is changing absolutely every industry and every part of life and society and behavior.
Pete CashmoreWe must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant's revolution, but one of the extreme Right.
Salvador DaliThe church generation in which Jesus returns will actively participate in this revolution. ... My premise: Many people alive today will see this revolution in their lifetime.
Mike BickleEvery revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real.
C. Wright MillsRevolution is the only thing, the only power, that ever worked out freedom for any people. The powers that have ruled long and learned to love ruling, will never give up that prerogative until they must, till they see the certainty of overthrow and destruction if they do not. To plant-to revolutionize-these are the twin stars that have ruled our pathway. What have we then to dread in the word Revolution-we, the children of rebels!
Wendell PhillipsProduction of identity is a resistance element, an aggressive element. Both a refusal and an affirmation and an assertion, and certainly, we in Jamaica were talking about black art. And the idea that there is a role for art in the civil rights revolution and in the successor to the civil rights revolution.
Mark McMorrisWe know what we want. To us it means nothing that there is a Soviet Union somewhere in the world, for the sake of whose peace and tranquility the workers of Germany and China were sacrificed to Fascist barbarians by Stalin. We want revolution here in Spain, right now, not maybe after the next European war. We are giving Hitler and Mussolini far more worry with our revolution than the whole Red Army of Russia. We are setting an example to the German and Italian working class on how to deal with Fascism.
Buenaventura DurrutiThe Africans were oftentimes allied with the antagonist of the Republic. Now, you may want to step back and ask yourself why that might be. It may lead you to a reconsideration of the origins of the nation now known as the United States of America. As opposed to seeing it in the same vein as the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution, you might see it in the same vein as the revolt against British rule in Rhodesia in 1965, and, if so, that might help to shed light on why conservatism is so deeply entrenched in this republic.
Gerald HorneI thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution - but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution.
John LennonWhen you think of power, you think the state has power. When you look at it in terms of revolution, in terms of the state, you think of it in terms of Russia, the Soviet Union, and how those who struggled for power actually became victims of the state, prisoners of the state, and how that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We have to think of revolution much more in terms of transitions from one epoch to another.
Grace Lee BoggsThe only form of revolution beneficial to the people is one which destroys the entire state to the roots and exterminates all the state traditions, institutions and classesโฆ. Day and night [the revolutionary] must have but one thought, one aim โ merciless destructionโฆfor him morality is everything which contributes to the triumph of the revolution. Immoral and criminal is everything that stands in its way.
Sergey NechayevThe revolution is ... the blow dealt ... agains the counter force of tyranny, which has never entirely recovered from the blow, but which from then till now has gone on remolding and regrappling the instruments of governmental power, that the Revolution sought to shape and hold as defenses of liberty.
Voltairine de CleyreEach country, if it so desires, will make its own revolution. And if no such desire exists, no revolution will occur.
Joseph StalinThe Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was neither a revolution, nor great, nor cultural, and, in particular, not in the least proletarian.
Enver HoxhaThe revolution of ideas that will save us is a revolution of goodwill, of compassion, and of higher thinking. I believe that they outnumber the people who would choose fear. But they are not a particularly politicized force. If you look at the numbers of people buying books about revolutions from within and personal transformation as the key to global change, the numbers add up to a much greater audience than most people realize.
Marianne WilliamsonThe fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution.
Bell HooksTo see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. He keeps up appearances, it is true, but I feel the pinch. He gives a revolution as a merchant, whose credit is low, gives a ball.
Victor HugoThe world is poised on the cusp of an economic and cultural shift as dramatic as that of the Industrial Revolution. (OK, it doesn't take a genius, or even a politician, to figure out that big changes are afoot when we have a medium that lets someone throw up a virtual storefront on the Web and instantly gain access to the global market.)
Steven LevyThe sexual revolution produced cultural convulsions that were unparalleled in the 20th century.
Volkmar SiguschRevolutions existed in history, books were written about them, and lectures given: they were complicated phenomena, scientific, remote. While here, the riot of a week ago had turned out to be a real revolution and the shadow of death actually threatened all of us who were of the ruling cast.
Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of RussiaWomen were everywhere in the revolution. Women participated in it, and many women were killed. Then we had the right to speak up and gain some more rights, but what happened was there was a backlash. Why? Because we have the Salafists, Muslim Brothers, religious groups.
Nawal El SaadawiThe Roosevelt enactment of Social Security was a moral revolution in our country: We were assured that we would never reach the very depths of poverty. And to be told, that we are now going to gamble it, on Wall Street, is nonsense!
Arthur HertzbergI met Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage the second day after I arrived, you know. I had never seen or heard of Brakhage. For me, it was a revolution, because I was well educated in film, but American-style experimental film was known to me in the abstract, and I had seen practically nothing. I had seen a film then that Noรซl Burch had found and was distributing called Echoes of Silence. It was a beautiful film, three hours long. It goes forever and it was in black and white, very grainy, and I saw that film and I thought...it was not New Wave. It was really a new concept of cinema.
Babette MangolteMy dad had been born in Mexico and his family had to leave during the Mexican revolution.
Mitt RomneyBecause of the rush of human knowledge, because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not need to scream.
Roger EbertI do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence of supersession, the ferocity of a life that renounces nothing.
Raoul VaneigemRoosevelt was the one who had the vision to change our policy from isolationism to world leadership. That was a terrific revolution. Our country's never been the same since.
W. Averell HarrimanBeginning in the 1800s with the Industrial Revolution, when women started to go into the formal workforce, leaving working at home to working in factories, countries realized they needed to do something. And they started to pass paid maternity leave.
Jody HeymannTotal revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political and economic system is what interests me, but that's not on the ballot.
Russell BrandMarxism teaches that exploitation and degradation somehow produce resistance and revolution. It's been hard to say why. What I've learned from women's experience with sexuality is that exploitation and degradation produce grateful complicity in exchange for survival. They produce self-loathing to the point of extinction of self, and it is respect for self that makes resistance conceivable.
Catharine MacKinnonGovernment is founded not on force, as was the theory of Hobbes; nor on compact, as was the theory of Locke and of the revolution of 1688; nor on property, as was the assertion of Harrington. It springs from the necessities of our nature, and has an everlasting foundation in the unchangeable will of God.
James Otis