It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
—Dolores Ibárruri, 1936Quotes
An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.
—Henry Clay, 1842The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.
—Hannah Arendt, 1970The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
—Erich Fromm, 1941Revolutions are not about trifles, but they are produced by trifles.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCThose who give the first shock to a state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin; the fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another’s net.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580Revolution begins in putting on bright colors.
—Tennessee Williams, 1944The 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, 1862Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903Make the revolution a parent of settlement and not a nursery of future revolutions.
—Edmund Burke, 1790All 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, 1977Every revolution by force only puts more violent means of enslavement into the hands of the persons in power.
—Leo Tolstoy, 1893Revolutions never go backward.
—Thomas Skidmore, 1829