Archive

Quotes

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.

—George Sand, 1851

Make the revolution a parent of settlement and not a nursery of future revolutions.

—Edmund Burke, 1790

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

There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the mental tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.

—La Rochefoucauld, 1665

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871

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

—Henry Clay, 1842

Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.

—Italo Calvino, 1957

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, 1862

The spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit radically opposed to liberty.

—François Guizot, 1830

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

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

—Erich Fromm, 1941

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

—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1983

Who draws his sword against his prince must throw away the scabbard.

—James Howell, 1659