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.

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

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

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

Insurgents are like conquerors: they must go forward; the moment they are stopped, they are lost.

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.

Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms.

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.

Revolutions never go backward.

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.

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.

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.

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.