The 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, 1862Quotes
Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.
—Italo Calvino, 1957Revolutions are always verbose.
—Leon Trotsky, 1933Rebellion is no less a sin than divination.
—Book of Samuel, c. 550 BCIf not us, who? If not now, when?
—Czech slogan, 1989Make the revolution a parent of settlement and not a nursery of future revolutions.
—Edmund Burke, 1790All 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, 1977To 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, 1871Governments are not overthrown by the poor, who have no power, but by the rich—when they are insulted by their inferiors and cannot obtain justice.
—Dionysius of Halicarnassus, c. 20 BCThe 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, 1961Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous.
—Pierre Boulez, 1989The only justification of rebellion is success.
—Thomas B. Reed, 1878No 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, 1851