Archive

Quotes

All 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, 1977

Make the revolution a parent of settlement and not a nursery of future revolutions.

—Edmund Burke, 1790

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1776

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

—Leo Tolstoy, 1893

Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.

—Italo Calvino, 1957

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

—Jean Genet, 1983

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.

—George Sand, 1851

An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.

—Henry Clay, 1842

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

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

—Thomas Paine, 1778

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871

The only justification of rebellion is success.

—Thomas B. Reed, 1878

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

—Duke of Wellington, c. 1819