All revolutions devour their own children.
—Ernst Röhm, 1933Quotes
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made—through disobedience and through rebellion.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891No 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, 1851If not us, who? If not now, when?
—Czech slogan, 1989All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1977The 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, 1941Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.
—Italo Calvino, 1957All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
—Havelock Ellis, 1921In revolutions men fall and rise. Long before this war is over, much as you hear me praised now, you may hear me cursed and insulted.
—William Tecumseh Sherman, 1864Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1776The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1983