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Quotes

All revolutions devour their own children.

—Ernst Röhm, 1933

Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.

—Italo Calvino, 1957

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

—Henry Clay, 1842

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

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

—Thomas Paine, 1778

Revolutions never go backward.

—Thomas Skidmore, 1829

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

—Edmund Burke, 1790

Rebellion is no less a sin than divination.

—Book of Samuel, c. 550 BC

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

—Czech slogan, 1989

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

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

—Pope Leo XIII, 1885

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

—James Howell, 1659

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

—Jean Genet, 1983