Archive

Quotes

Revolutions are always verbose.

—Leon Trotsky, 1933

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

—Erich Fromm, 1941

The 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, 1970

All 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, 1977

Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up.

—Vladimir Lenin, 1918

The only justification of rebellion is success.

—Thomas B. Reed, 1878

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man, not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

—Jean Genet, 1983

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous. 

—Pierre Boulez, 1989

In 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, 1864

All men recognize the right of revolution, that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.

—Henry David Thoreau, 1849

If there was ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engaged.

—Thomas Paine, 1778

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.

—Hannah Arendt, 1970

An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.

—Henry Clay, 1842