Archive

Quotes

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

—Duke of Wellington, c. 1819

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

—Henry Clay, 1842

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

—Thomas Paine, 1778

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.

—Victor Hugo, 1862

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

—John F. Kennedy, 1962

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

—Leo Tolstoy, 1893

Revolutions are not about trifles, but they are produced by trifles. 

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

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

—Havelock Ellis, 1921

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

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

And then, sir, there is this consideration: that if the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up and, claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.

—Samuel Johnson, 1791

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

—Erich Fromm, 1941

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

—Edmund Burke, 1790