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Quotes

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

Revolutions are always verbose.

—Leon Trotsky, 1933

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

—François Guizot, 1830

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the state.

—Albert Camus, 1951

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

—Duke of Wellington, c. 1819

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.

—Abraham Lincoln, 1861

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

—Hannah Arendt, 1970

The 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, 1961

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

—Thomas Paine, 1778

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

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1776

Those who give the first shock to a state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin; the fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another’s net.

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

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

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903