Archive

Quotes

The only justification of rebellion is success.

—Thomas B. Reed, 1878

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

—John F. Kennedy, 1962

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

Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up.

—Vladimir Lenin, 1918

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

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

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

—Havelock Ellis, 1921

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

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1776

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

—Hannah Arendt, 1970

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

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous. 

—Pierre Boulez, 1989

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

—Czech slogan, 1989