Quotes About Revolution

In comparison to the French Revolution, the American Revolution has come to seem a parochial and rather dull event. This, despitethe fact that the American Revolution was successful--realizing the purposes of the revolutionaries and establishing a durable political regime--while the French Revolution was a resounding failure, devouring its own children and leading to an imperial despotism, followed by an eventual restoration of the monarchy.

A revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way.

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.

Big fish eats small fish; oceans need revolution! Big man beats little man; world needs revolution! Big galaxies swallow little galaxies; universe needs revolution! Anything which is not ethical needs a strong revolution!

Revolution 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).

Today America's on the wrong side of the world revolution. What I mean by that is, the world revolution is the people's revolution, the liberation movements in all the third world countries, which when everyone tries to get started the U.S. stops.

How is Marxist-Leninist theory to be linked with the practice of the Chinese revolution? To use a common expression, it is by "shooting the arrow at the target". As the arrow is to the target, so is Marxism-Leninism to the Chinese revolution. Some comrades, however, are "shooting without a target", shooting at random, and such people are liable to harm the revolution.

The 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

'Revolution' does not necessarily involve sanguinary strife nor is there any place in it for individual vendetta. It is not the cult of the bomb and the pistol. By 'Revolution' we mean that the present order of things, which is based on manifest injustice, must change.

Chairman 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.

A revolution without a prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny. A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don't know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won't act for change but won't strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution

No one revolution up to now has brought all that was expected of it by the masses. Hence the inevitability of a certain disillusionment, of a lowering of the activity of the vanguard, and consequently, of the growing importance of the rearguard. [Joseph] Stalin's faction has raised itself on the wave of reaction against the October revolution.

A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution.

The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think.

You and I love understanding American Revolution, but let's also understand the digital revolution, because that makes us more comfortable with our technology.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

What really turns me on about technology is not just the ability to get more songs on MP3 players. The revolution - this revolution - is much bigger than that. I hope, I believe. What turns me on about the digital age, what excites me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing.

What is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution.

Revolution is an awakening, so is the spring! Spring is an awakening, so is the revolution!

My call for a spiritual revolution is not a call for a religious revolution. Nor is it a reference to a way of life that is somehow otherworldly, still less to something magical or mysterious. Rather it is a call for a radical reorientation away from our habitual preoccupation with self. It is a call to turn toward the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct which recognizes others' interests alongside our own.

A revolution that leaves our conceptualization of self and world intact cannot bring other than temporary, superficial change. Only a much deeper revolution, a reconceiving of who we are, can reverse the crises of our age.

Revolution should be Syrian, cannot be revolution imported from abroad.

The American Revolution was a vindication of liberties inherited and possessed. It was a conservative revolution.

Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of the revolution and on the fascist return of a war-machine in general, why not think that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible, and that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a plane of consistance which undermines the plane of organization of the World and the States?

I 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.

Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows.

The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.

We have the right of revolution. Revolution does not always have to be weapons and warfare; it's also about revolutionary ideas.

The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology-the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects.

In the last couple of years before Chairman Mao's death he said that the "Cultural Revolution" had been wrong on two counts: one was "overthrowing all", and the other was waging a "full-scale civil war". These two counts alone show that the "Cultural Revolution" cannot be called correct. Chairman Mao's mistake was a political mistake, and not a small one.

Historians will look back on this era and how the Internet changed what we value, what we consider art, the way we think, the way we define what it means to be human. In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling describes the changes that occurred between about 1850 and 1920, due to the Industrial Revolution and the resulting migration of people from small communities to relative anonymity in cities. Because of that paradigm shift, ideas about what it means to be an individual underwent a transformation that leeched into all areas. Art, psychology, history, marriage, gender.

A successful unification of quantum theory and relativity would necessarily be a theory of the universe as a whole. It would tell us, as Aristotle and Newton did before, what space and time are, what the cosmos is, what things are made of, and what kind of laws those things obey. Such a theory will bring about a radical shift - a revolution - in our understanding of what nature is. It must also have wide repercussions, and will likely bring about, or contribute to, a shift in our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the rest of the universe.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies.

You said, 'They’re harmless dreamers and they’re loved by the people.' 'What,' I asked you, 'is harmless about a dreamer, and what,' I asked you, 'is harmless about the love of the people? Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.

Revolution means democracy in today's world, not the enslavement of peoples to the corrupt and degrading horrors of totalitarianism

A revolution is to bring on change and we're spiritual people trying to bring on spiritual change. It might sound like I'm a dreamer, but economic models have reached their height of evolution. Technology has evolved. What hasn't evolved is mankind's spirituality; everything is from 3,000 years ago.

There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order.

Well I am always interested my people's right. But I will push myself to a revolution without arms.

You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves.

We don't have a revolution, and we don't have the time for evolution, where does it come from? It must come from some kind of shared experience that everybody agrees with.

Revolution is a drama of passion. We did not win the people over by appealing to reason but by developing hope, trust, fraternity.

We didn't understand irony yet in the '80s; we just kind of existed at face value, so there was no nerd cool yet because the digital revolution was still in its infancy.

I do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence of supersession, the ferocity of a life that renounces nothing.

All machinery is derived from nature, and is founded on the teaching and instruction of the revolution of the firmament.

The way of even the most jusitifiable revolution is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds.

As far as Bernie Sanders is concerned, he is a decent, honest person, and I supported him. What he means by socialism is New Deal Liberalism. In fact, his actual policies would not have been a great surprise to General Eisenhower. The fact that this is called a "political revolution" is a sign of how far to the right the political spectrum has shifted, mainly in the last 30 years since the neoliberal programs began to be instituted. What he was calling for was a restoration of something like New Deal Liberalism, which is a very good thing.

I mean, already in the French Revolution, the harpsichord becomes identified with the aristocracy, with the ancien regime. Plus, hey, you know, I mean, harpsichord is a really easy target, isn't it? I mean, it's - it's just how it is.

There is no other revolution except consciousness. It cuts the desires from the very roots and it brings freedom to you.