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Quotes

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

—Havelock Ellis, 1921

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

—Thomas Paine, 1778

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

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

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

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

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous. 

—Pierre Boulez, 1989

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

—Leo Tolstoy, 1893

Governments are not overthrown by the poor, who have no power, but by the rich—when they are insulted by their inferiors and cannot obtain justice.

—Dionysius of Halicarnassus, c. 20 BC

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

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

Rebellion is no less a sin than divination.

—Book of Samuel, c. 550 BC

The only justification of rebellion is success.

—Thomas B. Reed, 1878

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1776