Revolutions are always verbose.
—Leon Trotsky, 1933Quotes
Those who give the first shock to a state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin; the fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another’s net.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
—Victor Hugo, 1862To escape its wretched lot, the populace has three ways, two imaginary and one real. The first two are the rum shop and the church; the third is the social revolution.
—Mikhail Bakunin, 1871No one makes a revolution by himself, and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.
—George Sand, 1851There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the mental tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1665The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.
—Hannah Arendt, 1970The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
—Erich Fromm, 1941The 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.
—Frantz Fanon, 1961If not us, who? If not now, when?
—Czech slogan, 1989Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
—Germaine Greer, 1970Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
—John F. Kennedy, 1962