Archive

Quotes

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

—Henry Clay, 1842

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

—Pope Leo XIII, 1885

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

—Duke of Wellington, c. 1819

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

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

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man, not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

—Jean Genet, 1983

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

—James Howell, 1659

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

—Hannah Arendt, 1970

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

—François Guizot, 1830

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

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

—Albert Camus, 1951

Rebellion is no less a sin than divination.

—Book of Samuel, c. 550 BC

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.

—Oscar Wilde, 1891