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Quotes

Revolutions are always verbose.

—Leon Trotsky, 1933

All revolutions devour their own children.

—Ernst Röhm, 1933

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

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

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

—Czech slogan, 1989

The only justification of rebellion is success.

—Thomas B. Reed, 1878

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

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

—Edmund Burke, 1790

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.

—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1977

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

Revolutions never go backward.

—Thomas Skidmore, 1829

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

—Thomas Paine, 1778

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

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

—Pope Leo XIII, 1885