Archive

Quotes

The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

—Germaine Greer, 1970

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

—Leo Tolstoy, 1893

To escape its wretched lot, the populace has three ways, two imaginary and one real. The first two are the rum shop and the church; the third is the social revolution.

—Mikhail Bakunin, 1871

I began revolution with eighty-two men. If I had to do it again, I do it with ten or fifteen and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.

 

—Fidel Castro, 1959

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

—Havelock Ellis, 1921

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

—Dolores Ibárruri, 1936

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

—Hannah Arendt, 1970

The only justification of rebellion is success.

—Thomas B. Reed, 1878

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

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

—Jean Genet, 1983

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