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Quotes

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

All revolutions devour their own children.

—Ernst Röhm, 1933

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

—Thomas Paine, 1778

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

—François Guizot, 1830

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

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

—Henry Clay, 1842

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

—John F. Kennedy, 1962

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

Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms.

—Wendell Phillips, 1859

Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 63 BC

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

—Czech slogan, 1989

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

Every revolution by force only puts more violent means of enslavement into the hands of the persons in power.

—Leo Tolstoy, 1893