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.

To cast aside obedience, and by popular violence to incite revolt, is treason, not against man only, but against God.

The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

To 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.

All revolutions devour their own children.

Insurgents are like conquerors: they must go forward; the moment they are stopped, they are lost.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

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.

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

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

Revolutions are not about trifles, but they are produced by trifles.