All revolutions devour their own children.

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.

No 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.

If not us, who? If not now, when?

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.

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.

Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

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.

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

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

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